In- | Searching For- Qismat

The walls are the color of worn toothpaste. Fluorescent lights hum a note just below hearing. Your mother is in room 317. The doctor has used words like palliative and months . You are not listening. You are watching a janitor mop the same square of linoleum for the tenth time. He wears headphones. His lips move silently to a song you will never know.

You said goodbye three years ago. The call lasted eleven minutes. You remember the number—not because you memorized it, but because your thumb still hovers over the same digits when loneliness sharpens its teeth at 2 a.m. You never press dial.

One morning, you hear a word in a language you do not speak. A documentary about the Arctic. An Inuit elder says qimmirq —the act of waiting for the ice to break. It is not a noun. It is a verb. A waiting that is also a becoming. Searching for- qismat in-

It is three in the afternoon. The street outside Lahore’s Anarkali Bazaar is a fever dream of rickshaws, shouting vendors, and a sun that refuses to relent. You sit on a plastic stool, the wood of the table scarred by decades of cups and elbows. The chai wallah pours from a height: a long, unbroken amber arc that lands without a splash. He does this a thousand times a day. Is that his qismat? Or yours, to witness it?

The dash is the most important punctuation mark in the search. Because the truth—the uncomfortable, beautiful, infuriating truth—is that you never find qismat in anything. You find it between things. The walls are the color of worn toothpaste

The word arrives like a half-remembered melody, its syllables soft as a fingerprint pressed into dust: qismat . Arabic in root, Persian in bloom, Urdu in the ache of its everyday use. Fate. Destiny. The lot one is given before drawing the first breath. It is the invisible script that some believe is written on the night of conception, sealed by an angel’s pen, immutable as a mountain range.

Qismating. The act of arriving at the thing you did not know you were walking toward. The doctor has used words like palliative and months

Later, you learn the number was reassigned. The person you loved moved to another country, changed their name, started a new life. The boy on the phone was not theirs. He was just a boy who happened to pick up.

Like the word hello from a voice you have never heard before, asking, without knowing it, to be remembered. — End of piece —

Your own name means nothing. It was chosen from a baby name book, your mother tells you, because it had four letters and was easy to spell. But you have spent years searching for qismat in other names: the boy who left, the city that burned, the book that changed you at seventeen.

A nurse with tired eyes offers you a blanket you do not want. She has done this a thousand times. Is that her qismat? Or is it yours, to receive the blanket?