“Ammi!” I cried. “What do you mean he’s expecting my call?”

My mother raised both her hands and shrugged. “I’m just telling you what she told me. No pressure, Leila. Call if you want, or not.”

She placed the number next to my plate and then returned to the stove while I sat there brooding quietly, trying not to make direct eye contact with the brightly colored sticky note glaring at me aggressively. So this is supposedly my match? These ten digits scribbled hurriedly on a piece of paper? I suddenly envied all the cute couples who had sweet, romantic stories of how they first met. “Both of us reached for the last copy of Jane Eyre at the bookstore, and he’s been my Rochester ever since!” or “We locked eyes during ‘La Macarena’ at my sister’s wedding and realized that this was much more than a one-hit wonder!”

What would my sweet first-encounter story be? “Oh, my mother got his number from a matchmaker, and since I was almost a month into my three-month deadline and I’d exhausted all my other options, I figured what the hell.” I sighed. Leave it to South Asians to find a way to wipe out every smidgen of romance from the process. I stuffed the last of the pancake down my throat and placed the empty plate into the sink.

“Thanks for the food, Ammi,” I said on my way out. “If you need me, I’ll be at the coffee shop,” I called over my shoulder, leaving my ten-digit match on the counter untouched.

* * *

After spending hours inhaling espressos, grading papers, and making out a week’s worth of lesson plans, I finally called it a day and returned home. My parents were in the living room watching a television show about child geniuses that was literally called Child Genius, so I walked back into my room unnoticed and shut the door behind me. The first thing I saw on my nightstand was the Post-it note beckoning me with its bright yellow hue. Of course, when my mother had said, “Call if you want, or not,” she hadn’t actually meant I had a choice.

I picked up the number and lay down on my bed, turning it over and over again, my fingers tracing the handwritten name scrawled in blue ink. Sajid. From the corner of my eye, I could see the calendar on the wall with three weeks’ worth of X’s crossed off.

I sighed and shut my eyes, trying to imagine what it would be like if I weren’t Indian. If there were no time limit on my future, and I were free to pursue love however I wanted. Would I still be searching for the same thing? I thought about my forty-six-item list. The problem was not with who I was searching for; the problem was with how I was searching for him. And the limited amount of time I’d been given to find him. Unfortunately, a life without this external time constraint was a freedom reserved for those who weren’t wheat-complexioned. But since I was never not going to be Indian, I had no choice except to surrender to the fact that all my relationships were going to come with a healthy dose of marital pressure.