Let no man seek
Henceforth to be foretold what shall befall
Him or his children.
John Milton (Paradise Lost)
If my readers are going to believe me inthe state of mind that I’m beset with at this non-existent time andhabitational nonconformity, which in no way stand affirmative with any remainsof our hitherto dwelling place, the earth, which was made replete with all theturpitude and abjection that was ever known to us human beings, then suffice itto say that an immense field has been prepared and in this quiet immensitystand I the wretched and the never-before-seen multitude of throngs ofill-fated people, who fill, extend unto the limitless extremities of thishumongous amphitheatre built to comply with the decrees that thunder forth andsend quivers through this silent environ, set for the enactment of ‘The LastJudgement’. The overhanging orb of limitless magnitude has been pulled down, oras if the earth has taken a great leap toward this bright emblem of fire whichis held at unbelievable proximity. This gruesome visage of the stellarapparition, which hitherto fore used to be known as Sun, has now been renderedwith the most hideous and appalling look. No palatial palaces; no colossalpyramids and tombs; no skyscrapers, mahals and minarets; no mansions, adobes,shacks and shanties; nothing of such remains can be seen; no sky-high peaks andridges with gilded snows; no lush green forests with their strutting pines andcedars, which, in their haughtiness, had, up to a little before, — ah! Tempusfugit, — never known or felt any deciduity, — all and everything razed toearth and dust; a demolition prerequisite to the beginning of this firstchapter of Eternity.
And, as this wretched ‘I,’ I standignominious and contrite in this Hall of Shame. I don’t have any inkling abouthow I landed in this barren landscape whose surreal and parched topography I amnot able to relate with any of the images. While I seem to be lost in thisthought, I perceive people being dragged away by what behoves my mind to callseraphims, toward a place that, given the distance from which I behold it,appears to be a kind of portal, through which the damned, with abjectionclearly writ across their dark brows and extremely sordid appearances, getpushed into some unknown, harrowing declivity. I had been, in my prior stage oflife, I mean before my death, if not an accomplished artist but verily an artlover who, ever and anon, wielded my brushes, too, to transfigure my ideas ontothe canvases stretched before me, in my dingy Atelier which always used to befilled with an air impregnated with strong smells of the Oils and theparaphernalia related to the Muse.
And the quandary of not being able to wringout from my mind, in a stasis state, the memories of my past life, brings twopure, white lights before me, — some inexplicable apparitions, though with nodefinite form — who grant me my wish — “We will make you wade throughthis dream, retrogradely, and I emphasise ‘retrogradely’; an evanescent dream,an illusion which you humans considered as the only reality. It will provideyou with the answers to your perplexions,” murmur, sotto voce, one ofthese two what seems to be some angelic forms. My bafflement reaches its acmewhen I perceive I no longer need to move my limbs for travelling, as I’m notbeing dragged along, “non passibus aguis”, in the words of Virgil,and I veritably levitate and wade through some strange space, and reach a placewhere, to my utter surprise and appalment, I behold, with my mouth agape, thesethrongs of people retreat like some rigid and stiff shafts, with their feetfirst, into their respective subterranean resting places; warrens of multiplehorizontal catacombs beneath the surface of this dreary expanse of land. Thetwo luminal-guides, my auroral ushers, miraculously tow me onto my undergroundjourney through the labyrinthine placement of niches which seem to belong tosome remote antiquity.
In this quiet, subterranean world ofcorpses, — a Styx it reminds me of, where this underground river-of-dead seemsnever-ending and my guides’ effulgence illumine for me this otherwise a stygianunderworld, — I see, while wading preternaturally along the netherworldaisles, shrouds of varied shapes and in multiplicity of ineffable conditionwhich they exhibit, ensconced in their catacombic sojourns. And we proceedthrough these many a crisscross pattern of meandering passageways, plunge intomany a dismal tunnel of representation of the tales of both abjection andbeatitude, and, in my quest to come closer to the trail of my life, I discovershreds of evidence that give telltale of our globe trottings in the timeshumans had spent on earth. A little more of the space explored and we come toperhaps an underground revealment of some necropolis, and here the sight whichis lit only by the light of guides, looks very ghastly and fear-evoking, which,nevertheless, makes a shudder pass through me.
“And you will have now a glimpse ofyour dead body, which, given the ravages that time and mostly your sins havebrought upon it, will be undecipherable for you,” the guide aware me ofthe approaching pit, and to define it completely is beyond my already violatedlimit and time that the Editor has prescribed me. I see what deems to be calledas a few mangled remains of my dead body, lying in a very pallid condition, andthe place reeks of those worst gutters which used to carry all the sewage andputrefied offal of our whole city.
“Now is the time for your journey intothe final phase which you will traverse on your own,” my guide warn me.And instantly I find me placed once again on the surface of our planet. Irealise, in the manner of Adam, after his descent from the paradise, that Istand all alone searching wistfully the lost belongings of my life, — mybeautiful wife Sarah, and the two little angels, my daughters, Mariah of 5, andFarah of 3 years at the time of my death, — amidst a concourse covered with athick layer of snow, which, like some burlesque, recreates a travesty of myearlier world before my misty eyes. Like some somnambulist’s my feet guide me,without my being conscious of the route, onto a slightly elevating road whichseems to end at the ruin of some house. The fragmentary signs and landmarks onboth sides of the road, like some repeating lines of a fiction book, which helpto refreshen the whole plot, reconnect me with my past, and I realise that theruin, towards which I’m proceeding now, define nothing but the sorry plight ofmy own home. At the end of the road my eyes meet only a few, shambled remainsof our gatepost, from one of which hangs limpidly, like the stuck out tongue ofa dead animal, the half-destroyed sign plate displaying a few remaining lettersof our house name, “Jannat.” A few, heavy steps take me into thepremises, and the view, no longer any toiles peintes that it produced for meback then, and the dilapidated condition of my house and other details around,make two streams sprinkle from my eyes — the destructive design Fate had madebefall us lie visible but shimmeringly before my tearful eyes, as if flotsambobbing near a wrecked, capsized ship seen through the mists of time.Everything seems to be desiccated of its vital sap of life, and what has beenleft behind by the death and destruction, hardly seems to be sufficient for meto redefine the structure. While I find every feather and twig of my once acosy nest scattered all around, my bleary eyes travel against the thick,curlingly-falling snowflakes and get fixed at the overcast, gloomy firmament,and I beseech my god to grant me my final wish; “prithee! Help me meet myfamily so that I shall come to know what caused our end.”
With no less than a miracle, amidst all mybewilderment and fear, I see my wish come true as the ruin gets transmogrifiedand I get stunned to watch all the details of my house being resuscitated byand by. The whole garden in its front gets enlivened. The portico returns toits proper place that is a little left from the centre of the house, and twogothic gables top the second storey build mostly of wood. Two spruces sproutmagically from the ground, one at each end of the house and, in no time, reachthe roof of the structure they used to be in the acquaintance of. Twobrick-chimneys at the left side of the gable begin to billow out thick wisps ofgreyish smoke into the air where they commingle with snowflakes adrift in thefrigid climate. In the meantime, my wife, lean, tall, and always verynimble-footed, comes out of the house, running toward me. With her pallid-facelifted at me, she shakes me by my shoulders, with her slim, white hands, in atry to jostle me out of my dilemma; what is real and what a dream!
“Where have you been all these years?In your absence, every single day has been a perpetual hell for us. Ourneighbours have fled their houses and run to safety. With the bombings going oneverywhere in the area, I was always very fretful and ‘on tenterhooks’ for thesafeguard of our daughters,” Sarah expresses her concerns.
The entire landscape is dotted with deepcraters made by the various blitz actions in a war-torn world. All around myeyes meet large-scale devastation of every natural or man-made structure lyingin a worst, calamitous condition, which even the thick icy layer is not able tohide. The rubble of concrete; fragments of iron bars, contorted, bend, halfvisible, half embedded in hunks from the buildings; broken facades; shatteredjambs; clouds of black smoke emanating from each destroyed house, whirlingtoward the lugubrious, dark sky; eerie remains and belongings of long gonefamilies and other detritus narrate the bleak story of each hearth andhousehold.
The chilly air all around us is rent withthe sharp shrieks of the flying fighter-jets of both the neighbouringcountries, and bombs dropped every now and then strike the place with hugethuds and bangs, uplifting dense and tall clouds of debris which tinge thewhite, surrounding snow with black and the crimson of killed human bodies, andmake the surly ravens and raptors, present profusely in the area, flee invaried directions and leave behind their sonorous calls reverberating in thefrozen valley. Decapitated tree trunks and branches, shell-holes and bullet-bores,muck, litter and other sordidness, everywhere, present the gloomy picture thatthe war has made my exhausted eyes to behold. The entire locale has been turnedinto a battleground.
“Let’s take our daughters and run awayfrom this hell. Now that I’m back I won’t let any harm come to my family. Wedon’t have time and we need to run for our lives,” I, in a hurry, suggestSarah act quick, and we take our daughters out of the house. I decide not to goby the road, and instead we move, surreptitiously, through our backyard, amidthick growth of shrubbery lying in a deep slumber under the cover of snow,toward the spot which marks the end of the flat ground and which then descendssteeply to the bed of a vast moor; a wasteland having the sporadic presence ofbrushes, Erica remains, and a lot of weird trees scattered all over, theircontours obliterated by the snowy blanket. The girls whimper and seem to beclueless about the fatality lying in store for all. And we descend thedeclivity, with great difficulty, toward the vast bed of this last refuge ofours beneath the sombre sky heavily laden with dark clouds, oozing its tears ofburly snowflakes at the sorry state this place has been plunged into. We plodfrantically, helter-skelter, so as to be away from this horrendous massacre.
“Shh! With all of us together, nothingbad is going to happen to us. We will reach safety soon. So, try to be goodgirls and keep quiet.” I try to calm down the kids, while my apprehensionsknow no bounds, and my heart is beating fit to burst. Our feet immerse deepinto the snow while we tread along, panting and feeling short of breath as wequicken our pace toward the clumps of bushes, where I think we can hide forsome time, from aerial and ground attacks. An aerial view may present us assmall black dots fleeing like a quarry, from our enemy, in the bluish gleam oftwilight after dusk, amidst this wide an ocean of snow with upheavals of cragsand hillocks. We witness from the long distance, a fatal bomb strike our”Jannat” which, with a violent shake, collapses, scatters, and israzed to the ground and I believe that’s the reason why my eyes had at thebeginning of my earthly journey met the ruinous state of my house. All of asudden we get surrounded by the soldiers wearing helmets and heavy olivefatigues, carrying their loaded weapons which, in no time, they aim at us, andwe are dragged out of our hiding.
“I suggest you run for your life andleave the ladies behind,” the brazen, swarthy Major intimidates me.
“You will have to kill me first beforeyou can lay your bloody hands on my family.”
“In that case, I have no problem infinishing you off right here and now in front of your loved ones.”
“You won’t be able to kill an alreadya dead family, and you’re dead too, as we’re living a dream only, and believeme, while I say this, you too must be, at present, going through the strictesttrials of ‘The judgement day’, in all their asperity, in the presence ofGod,”
“Keep your filthy mouth shut. I’venever in my whole career heard such blather,” the much irritated Majorblurts out, along with a few harsh invectives.
At the same time, we see the westward skywith the thick layer of clouds being rolled up, and from underneath a huge sunstarts rising in total refutation of the timing and the maxims which hadotherwise until now decided ‘East’ as its place of origin at every daybreak. Arain of black, dead ravens and raptors, as frozen rags, fall from the sky,which mottles the entire snowscape. With loud, deafening percussions of theDeath-knell, which keep all of us stunned and comatose for a few moments, allthe snowy mountains and hills find their abrupt and horrible dissolutionwherewith the detritus, like particolored carded-wool, start flying speedilythrough the air. A great tremor passes beneath our feet and we are shaken tothe core. And we see a great swell of fire as big as can fill the entire viewbefore our eyes, starts rolling from the place of this new sun, which seems tobe rushing toward us, and sweeping, destroying and annihilating everything.
“O, my God! What the hell isthis!” Sarah can’t believe her eyes.
“Daddy! What is it that we arewitnessing? What has happened to time? It’s very horrible! Are we going to die,daddy? Save us, daddy!” my daughters weep and whine.
“Don’t look at it. Look into my eyes,and try to be the brave girls that you’ve proved up to now. Isn’ t it enoughthat we’re together at this hour of doom, supporting and loving each other withall heart? Nothing is going to put us asunder, not even this mammothtempestuousness of Doomsday. There’s nothing in this life which is as real asdeath, and the rest is an illusion only.” While we all embrace with a bighug, the giant wave of deflagration travels supersonically, accompanied by agreat whoosh, and annihilates everything in its path.