A Wish, In Three Parts — Part 1: Careful What You Wish For

Hasbunallahu wa ni’mal wakeel, ni’mal maula wa ni’man nasir.

Roughly: God is enough for us, and He is the best guardian, protector, and helper we could have.

It is a phrase with old roots.

Tradition holds that Ibrahim said some version of it once, facing a fire that was supposed to end him.

Centuries later, a small group of the Prophet’s companions said the same words again, facing an army they had been warned to fear.

Both times, it was less a request than a kind of surrender — the sense that whatever came next was no longer fully theirs to decide.

I am not someone who would call himself especially devout.

I have missed more than I have kept.

But that morning I said it anyway, quietly, like a habit I did not remember starting.

I was on my way to an exam in a subject I had spent the entire year trying to avoid.

For most of my life up to that point, I had not thought of myself as someone particularly capable.

Not stupid, exactly.

Just someone who had never once been mistaken for the smart one in a room.

So when two of us were chosen to represent the school, some part of me assumed it was closer to a scheduling accident than a vote of confidence.

The subject I was asked to represent was the one my father taught

My father taught chemistry at the school I attended.

That fact followed me everywhere, whether I brought it up or not.

Before either of us could represent anything, the school needed to choose between the two of us — a placement test, nothing more, meant to decide who would go on to the regional round.

I did not volunteer for that either.

I was asked, then expected, then simply assumed to be going.

My worry was never about the material.

My worry was about what people would say if I did well, and what they would say if I did not.

If I lost, it would confirm I was ordinary.

If I won, someone would say it was arranged.

Either way, the subject itself had almost nothing to do with it.

I sat through that placement exam barely understanding half the questions.

The result was not good.

But it was slightly better than the other student’s, and that was enough to send me forward, alone, to the regional round.

I did not want to win. I wanted the questioning to stop.

What I actually felt about the subject

I need to be honest about something that complicates this story.

I did not love the subject I was about to represent.

Some weeks I actively avoided it.

The letters and symbols made sense to everyone else in a way they never quite did to me, and I had made peace with being unremarkable at it.

But peace is not the same as choice.

There was no version of that year where I could simply say no.

Not because anyone forced me directly.

Because the expectation was already built into the air around my father’s name.

So I studied a subject I resented, for a competition I had not asked to enter, to protect a reputation that was never mine to protect.

The morning the wish came true

The night before the regional round, I barely slept.

Not from excitement.

From dread.

I remember walking to the exam hall reciting the same sentence I did not fully understand the weight of yet.

I remember opening the paper and recognizing, almost by accident, most of what was written.

Not because I was talented.

Because I had repeated the same material so many times out of sheer fear that some of it had finally stuck.

I placed first at the regional level.

I felt relief before I felt pride.

It was not a large win by any outside measure.

But it answered the one question I had carried into the exam hall without ever saying out loud: whether I had been chosen because of my father’s name, or because I could actually do something with it myself.

At the regional level, at least, that question now had an answer.

Whatever happened next.

What happened after the win nobody expected

The provincial round did not go the same way.

I did not place.

Someone I’d met at that same provincial round — a different subject, a different city — did, and moved on to represent the province at a national stage.

For a while, everyone’s attention shifted toward him, which felt fair, because I knew he had worked for it in a way I had not fully matched.

I still remember standing near the announcement board, half congratulating him, half quietly disappearing from the conversation.

My mother’s response, when I told her, was not dramatic.

She did not tell me I should have tried harder.

She did not tell me it did not matter.

She simply let both things be true: that I had done something worth acknowledging, and that someone else had done something greater, and neither fact needed to cancel the other out.

What the win actually gave me

Looking back, the competition did not teach me that I was good at the subject.

It taught me something else, more slowly.

It taught me that I had been chasing the wrong question the entire time.

I had spent the year asking, will this prove something to the people watching.

I had never once asked, is this something I would choose on my own.

That second question did not have an answer yet.

But for the first time, I let myself notice that it existed.

I got what I had wished for that year, in a size smaller than I expected.

A regional win. A place secured on paper, once, before anyone could take it back. A name read out at an assembly, then quickly forgotten by everyone except me.

It did not undo every question people had carried before the competition began.

But it was enough, at least once, to answer it.

What I did not know yet was that a stage far bigger than any of this was still waiting for me.

Not through this subject.

Not for any reason anyone watching would have predicted.

Part 2: [link]