Searching For- | Qismat In-

You walk to the window. Below, an ambulance arrives. No siren. Too late for sirens. Two paramedics slide a gurney out with careful, practiced hands. The person on it is covered in a sheet. Someone—a woman in a salwar kameez the color of lemons—runs behind them, her sandals slapping the asphalt. She is not crying. She is making a sound like a small animal.

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

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.

Between the chai cup and the wrecked phone call. Between the hospital corridor and the janitor’s forgotten song. Between the name you were given and the one you chose for yourself. Searching for- qismat in-

Searching for qismat in— is not a failure. It is the only honest way to live.

But the preposition that follows— in —is the hinge upon which the whole search turns.

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. You walk to the window

It arrives quietly.

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.

Qismating. The act of arriving at the thing you did not know you were walking toward. Too late for sirens

And when it does, it does not announce itself with thunder.

And you think: What if qismat is not a destination? What if it is a verb?

It is something that finds you.

So you keep searching. Not for answers. Not for certainty. But for the texture of the in-between. The way the light fell on the day you almost called. The smell of cardamom on a stranger’s fingers. The sound of a child answering a phone meant for a ghost.

Qismat is the gap. The breath. The space where the universe shrugs and says, Not yet. Not quite. Keep going.