It was a cool and brisk night when I decided that enough was enough and staying home was just boredom upon boredom. Putting my laptop to sleep, I felt like a mother who has put her crying 2-year-old to bed and has succeeded in pacifying it since the noise the fans created was like a constant sawing of your nerves. Using headphones was at times helpful yet they would leave you with a sort of headache after a long session of handling PC-related tasks. To do away with all sorts of such boredom and headache that technology leaves you with, I felt a strong lack of some spirit. By that, I mean something aside from what man has made. Something which would elevate my spirit and give me a push. Such a push that this world with all its grandeur would sound like a small lake when compared to an ocean. My head was getting filled with these thoughts as I left my room and got on my bike then a while later I was off to streets.
On the way to my nowhere destination, I met a group of friends but they were having petty trivial discussions so I felt I didn’t need to stick with them much longer. Maybe they would find my absence more desirable when I looked so pensive and did not talk much with them. Back on the track to nowhere. I was just roaming around feeling this lack of spirit and I would turn down any conversation with people.
I met another friend who was most interested in starting up a new business abroad. Though working abroad was at first something enticing and lured me towards it, then again it faded like any other thing in my head about this world. We had some exchange of ideas regarding new businesses and I left him, too. No sense of relief and not the least consoled from this pain of boredom which gnawed at my spirit, I got back again on my bike, my travel companion. I had taken my chance with the living, no point in that. Maybe I had to try conversing with the dead, too. So I changed my course towards the only cemetery of the town.
Unlike cemeteries in the western countries, it is no terrifying place at all in my town. With more lights on, it looks just normal. I stopped the bike at the smaller gate of the place. As I approached the place I felt I’m leaving something behind as if they were two realms or times. The border between those two realms was the gate. The realm of the living and realm of the dead. This is no horror story but I should just remind you readers that death can only scare you if you don’t have a firm belief in what happens after it as Shakespeare’s Hamlet was confused and scared of suicide because of “the dread of something after death, the undiscover’d country, from whose bourn, no traveller returns, puzzles the will, and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of?”
As death could be disquieting and puzzling for some, it can be reassuring and heartwarming for some others depending on one’s beliefs. I think I oscillated between the two. There were times that I found death the best thing to finish me off this world and enter me into another life. But God is in charge of the arrival of death to man. So my impulses to desire life and at times desire death could not mess with the Providence.
I entered the smaller gate of the graveyard and found it quiet with dim lights here and there. Then I walked the lanes where I was surrounded with dead. I couldn’t hear them but maybe they could so I called out to all of them lying there and greeted them with Salam. I proceeded to my aunt’s grave and stopped there but rather it stopped me. As I was reading Al-Fatiha at her grave, I closed my eyes. I saw her in her old days maybe she looked like she was in her 80s or 90s, a few years before she died. Sitting on her bed, her hands raised to pray, she was asking God to give her only faith in response to my mother who had told her earlier that she would live and God willing she would still remain with us for long despite old age. She preferred faith over everything and she wasn’t afraid of death. Because when one has faith that the promise of God is to come true which is paradise for the good and pure souls, something like death which acts only like a bridge between the two realms, can’t ever put them in a state of panic.
A cool spring breeze brought me round to this world and I opened my eyes. Still there in the graveyard and I expected nothing more. Walking past some more graves, I reached my father’s. I knocked at the grave as if I wanted to enter his room asking for permission. This knocking is a sort of tradition in my town. People do it as if they were trying to get the deceased’s attention to themselves or maybe to get more focused on a prayer. Again I started reading Al-Fatiha to him and closed my eyes. I pictured him from his youth in the earliest photo of him available all the way to his last day with us. He was aging in my imagination as if I was watching a time lapse of his entire life. After all, we all live and die, be it a life of time of 90 years or 50 years or even a time lapse of 10 seconds. The question is death which inevitably arrives at its due time and will not be a second late. I asked God paradise for him as well as my aunt and the rest of the believers. I sensed a pain in my toe and when I looked down at my feet, I found some thorns around my slippers. As I wanted to move, they were to pierce my toe. There were grown there on some graves thorns and on some others flowers as if they were to say that in the hereafter you may have either thorns or flowers based on your deeds here. I was filled with the thought of death and it didn’t seem to leave me. Next thing I remember was playing a surah of Quran on my mobile phone. I vividly remember it was surah Al-Qiyamah, the resurrection. I closed my eyes and I tried to picture every scene.
“Does man think that We will not assemble his bones? Yes. [We are] Able [even] to proportion his fingertips.” I pictured every unique fingertip getting formed again after all bones were assembled and then graves were breaking open and the dead rising all naked with dirt on them. There was a great uproar and chaos following that I could hear lots of cries.
“So when vision is dazzled, and the moon darkens, and the sun and the moon are joined, man will say on that Day, ‘Where is the [place of] escape?’” Indeed, there is no escape from this tremendous day as God has given them body again to stand for the reckoning of their deeds and He is to judge them all while all the universe is His dominion.
“And [some] faces, that Day, will be contorted, expecting that there will be done to them [something] backbreaking” God has described it all in the best way and manner possible. Those who fear death, it is not death itself that they are afraid of but something in them or in their souls scares them of these punishments.
The reciter continued to recite but I opened my eyes and walked towards the gate leaving what is apparent of the realm of the dead. That recitation filled the void in my spirit which I was suffering from that entire day and acted as a kind of healing or some balm on the wounds of my soul. The reciter finished the surah. Getting back on my bike, I found myself checking messages after turning on internet on my phone as though I was away from it for ages.
No doubt, this world has its pull on all of us and this force is pulling us material-wards as gravity pulls us earthwards. I remembered this Ayah from that surah as I switched on the bike to leave for home “No! But you love the immediate, and leave the Hereafter.”
