The Beginning,
Not the End

Everyone is constantly making plans for the life he will lead tomorrow, but only when death strikes at lightning speed does he finally understand that his ‘tomorrow’ will be—not in this world—but the next, eternal world.

On July 18, 1981, a railway guard named Jabir Husain set off on his last official journey on the railways. On the following day, his long period of service would be over. With a great sense of pleasurable anticipation, he contemplated the life of retirement that stretched before him—a life of ease with the freedom to do exactly as he pleased. As he set off on this last journey, he said with great satisfaction to his colleagues, “From tomorrow, I shall be starting on a new life!” For this journey, these prophetic words were his last in more senses than one. The express train on which he was travelling was a mere sixty kilometres away from its destination when it collided with a goods train, and Jabir Husain was killed outright. Commenting on fate’s irony, a railway official said, “Just another sixty kilometres and it would have been the end of his official journey.” (Indian Express, July 18, 1981)

Who does not picture a long and eventful life for himself? Everyone thinks that he will reach some tremendous and exciting turning point in his life in just “another sixty kilometres”. However, before the sixty-kilometre mark can be reached, the angel of death swoops down upon him and, catching him unaware, bears him off to another world. Everyone is constantly making plans for the life he will lead tomorrow, but only when death strikes at lightning speed does he finally understand that his ‘tomorrow’ will be—not in this world—but the next, eternal world. Where he had believed implicitly that he was nearing the end of some pleasant terrestrial journey and approaching some highly coveted goal, he was, in fact, upon the brink of eternity—at the beginning of things, not the end.