Searching For- Qismat In- -

And you realize: qismat is not what happens to you. It is what happens around you. The janitor’s song. The nurse’s blanket. The lemon-yellow woman’s running. These are the threads. Your mother’s room is one thread. The ambulance is another. The chai in Lahore is a third. They are all being woven at the same time, by hands you cannot see.

But the preposition that follows— in —is the hinge upon which the whole search turns. Searching for- qismat in-

And you think: Was that qismat? To be disconnected so completely that the only remnant of your love is a stranger’s child? Or was qismat the eleven minutes themselves—the fact that out of 525,600 minutes in that year, you had eleven that mattered? And you realize: qismat is not what happens to you

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. The nurse’s blanket