The Real Journey

Jabir Husain was a guard in the Indian Railways. His term of employment was just about to get over, when, on 17th July 1981, he boarded the Indore-Bilaspur Express. This was his last journey as a railway guard, because the next day he was going to retire. He had chalked out a detailed plan for his life after retirement. Setting off on his last journey as a railway guard, he said to his friends, “Tomorrow is the beginning of my new life!”

As things turned out, this journey did, indeed, prove to be Jabir Husain’s last one, after which his new life began. But it was not at all in the way he thought it would be. It was in a totally different manner. The train in which he was travelling was sixty kilometres from its destination when another train crashed into it. The train’s guard cabin was crushed and Jabir Husain died on the spot. A report in The Indian Express (18th July 1981), quoted a railway officer who commented on his death thus:

Sixty kilometres more and it would have been the end of his official journey.

But the very same thing holds true for every single person in this world. Everyone believes that he is going to live for a long time. He thinks that his journey will end only after ‘sixty kilometres’, but the Angel of Death grabs hold of him before those ‘sixty kilometres’ are crossed.

In this world, every person has made a ‘plan for tomorrow’ for himself—like Jabir Husain’s post-retirement plan—but suddenly, death takes hold of him and tells him that his ‘tomorrow’ will happen not in this world, but in another one. And it is where one thinks one’s journey has ended that one’s real journey starts.