He didn’t know his body was suffering from ghabrahat—a familiar South Asian language where anxiety shows up as palpitations, chest pressure, and terror. His heart wasn’t failing; it was screaming. Trying to process the accumulated silence of the apartment he shared with a father he ignored. Across the room, Meera typed aggressively on her laptop. She wasn’t sick; she was optimizing her sickness. She had scheduled her MRI between a Zoom call with the Singapore team and her son’s tuition pickup. She checked the token display. Patient 42. She was 45. “Excuse me,” she snapped at the receptionist, a young woman with the drained face of someone who hadn’t slept in a decade. “My appointment was 10:30. It’s 10:38. Do you have any idea what my hourly billing rate is?” Meera’s time was not a river. It was a mine. Every minute spent waiting felt stolen—from productivity, from self-worth, from identity. Her foot tapped like a metronome of rage. She didn’t notice the migraine behind her left eye was her body pulling the emergency brake.