Searching For- Qismat In- -
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?
Searching for qismat in— is not a failure. It is the only honest way to live.
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.
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? Searching for- qismat in-
And you think: What if qismat is not a destination? What if it is a verb?
Like the word hello from a voice you have never heard before, asking, without knowing it, to be remembered. — End of piece —
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. A nurse with tired eyes offers you a blanket you do not want
Like a hand on your shoulder in a crowded room.
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.
One night, you do. The phone rings once, twice. A voice you don’t recognize answers: “Hello? Who is this?” A child’s voice. A boy, maybe five years old, speaking a language you cannot place. You hang up. Or is it yours, to receive the blanket
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.
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.
And when it does, it does not announce itself with thunder.
