FINAL DESTINATION

I’ve just finished offering my Zuhr prayers, and all the while my mind was wandering in some far away meadows. In fact there were quite a few parallel streams of thought flowing at the same time. You can well imagine what sort of prayer it must have been; just going through the motions mechanically, with no spiritual involvement. I just hope God in his infinite Mercy forgives me once again.
The other day I saw the interview of Junoon’s Salman Ahmed. He was explaining how intoxicating music is. He could go on for eighteen hours straight, strumming his guitar randomly to some unsung melodies.Likewise is the case of random thoughts. I can go on harping about what goes on in my mind, and neither exhaust the supply of thoughts nor myself.The other day we were gathered, I floated the idea of letting each other know where we kept our ‘forbidden’ stuff, so that if we were to die at any moment, at least our families could be spared the extra agony of discovering what ‘things’ we were up to when we were alive. You know it’s so easy to say that we’ve got quite a few decades left in our life and that we can become sober and return to the ‘Path’ whenever we have lived our life to the Max.
But the thing is, you will never be able to live your life to the Max. A satisfied life? Yeah that’s very much possible, but there is no such thing as Maximum pleasure. And that’s because Homo sapiens’ wish list always exceeds their lifeline.
Can you give any guarantee that you’ll be alive next year, next day or the very next minute? This may sound absurd to most of you. What possibly can happen to us the very next minute if we are within the confines of our homes,offices, etc. where the possibility of anything disastrous happening is next to nil?
Think for a second.
What happened to the staff working in the World Trade Centre on that fateful Day? Could they’ve had even an inkling of what was going to happen? Never even in their wildest dreams could they have come up with the scenario of working in their cocoons and being killed by a 747 which happened to smash into their offices’window. It’s the same line of thinking that we all have.
I ponder sometimes what could have been the stream of thought going on in that person’s mind who happened to glance out of his office window and saw a jumbo airliner heading straight for him!
“This is just some sort of sophisticated joke,” would have been the likely declaration of any sane and reasonable person.
In a way, the scenario does sound comic, like a Tom and Jerry cartoon. It’s downright scary at the same time. I read somewhere that the heat generated by the exploding fuselage of the jet liners was so intense that the temperatures reached were about 2000-3000 C. Now that’s hot; the body can literally vaporize in a matter of seconds at such extremes. Could it have been painful? Now that’s unchartered territory. We’ll never be able to gauge how much pain death causes and whether the mode of death plays a role in the level and extent of pain or not. According to this thought-provoking Islamic book “Maut Ka Manzar” ( Scene of Death) I once read, death feels like your every limb is being cut or torn apart one by one. That’s how intense it is, irrespective of the mode of death. A man may look like he died peacefully, but that’s because he does not have the strength to utter any cry of anguish while the soul is being seeped slowly out of his body. That’s the scariest thing you’ll come across ever. And to think that each one of us is going to pass through this experience sooner or later. I don’t remember the exact verse, but the Holy Quran speaks of the fact that everything that is born has to taste death. So the ongoing intensive research of making man mortal is going to come to no good. At best it may increase the life expectancy of the humans manifold, but for how long? 100 years 1000 years or even 10,000 years. The end shall come no matter what. We know that Hazrat Nuh (AS) (Prophet Noah) lived around for 900 years and that the ages of people in that era bordered on 1000.
So coming back to freakish deaths, what are the odds of such a thing happening? Probably none. But it did. The same thing the victims of the Bam earthquake must have been thinking. And yet 20,000 people perished in the space of a few seconds. The ones who died instantaneously were the lucky ones. It’s the ones who got trapped and slowly suffocated to death who really faced the real fury of the quake.
Coming back to Karachi, could those three females, a mother and her two teenage daughters foreseen what was in store for them, when the mother very carefully nudged their Mehran from a side lane onto a seemingly deserted main road, only the car to be sliced into half( and probably them too) by an SUV(Pajero) driven by a couple of drunken teenagers.
The truth of the matter is, you never know when and where the Malakul Mauth (the Angel of Death) is going to strike. So you are never too young to come up with a Will of some sort; at least let your close friends know what you may want ‘corrected’ in your room once you are no more.Personally, I would advise you to do away with all those skeletons in your closet.
Be prepared.