Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [44]
Torture within the grave. Torture before Judgment Day. Torture on Judgment Day. Torture after Judgment Day. Torture for an eternity. Torture would start at the moment of death. I would be placed in my grave, and then two angels would come to ask me a series of questions about my faith and deeds. I would answer them to the best of my ability, but the entire interrogation would be rigged: Allah would have instructed my tongue to give testimony against me so that I wouldn’t be able to lie to escape the impending torture. Once I unwittingly admitted all my errors—and there were many, as I was realizing—the pain would commence. My soul would be sucked into Israfil’s trumpet in a most torturous way. Then maggots would consume my body from the left and worms would consume it from the right. All the pain of decomposition would be felt by my soul—in fact, the pain of being eaten, my flesh being consumed in the grave, would be felt all the way till the Day of Judgment. This was the recompense of sinners. This was the fate of those who declared rebellion against the things that exalted God.
Squatting down again, I rocked in the dark and told myself that I should have expected being entombed like this. Hadn’t I read the story of the Prophet Yunus in The Lives of the Prophets? He had been a Prophet of God, but when he told the Almighty that he wasn’t going to spread the Word anymore—that he was giving up, quitting, that he was “not going to do it anymore” just as I had said—God caused Yunus to be cast overboard during a storm. As further punishment, Yunus was then swallowed up by a whale, and he had to live in the belly of that beast in complete darkness, in utter and desolate darkness—a darkness that was probably considerably worse than the darkness of this room. If God could punish his chosen—a Prophet!—for his rebellion, why wouldn’t he punish me? In fact, my punishment would have to be worse, as my sin had been.
I leaned back against the wall and sighed. Then I traced back through my thoughts to determine where my mischief had started. The answer was easy: it had all begun when I started getting beaten. That was when I had first strayed from the path of obedience. As I thought it over now, getting beaten seemed like such a silly thing to have risked Allah’s displeasure over. Rooster, donkey, tied; stick, slap, kicks. I could take it in all the positions, in all the variations. Ultimately the body wasn’t mine. Main hoon Allah Mian ka. I belonged to Allah.
How could I have been so foolish? I wasn’t beaten because it was bad for me. I was beaten now because I was meant to serve Allah in a greater capacity later. That was the same reason that the angels Jibrail and Mikail had visited me. They had prepared me for the pain I would feel later in life. This was the same thing the qari was doing with his various punishments.
The fact that I was Abir ul Islam—chest rubbed upon the walls of the Ka’ba, promised to God before I was born, delivered to Muslims with the express purpose of serving Islam—only meant that God demanded more from me, just as he had from his Prophets. Every ordeal was a stepping stone in the service of Islam.
All these thoughts—my transition from terror to acceptance—had passed through my mind in mere seconds. As I stood up in the darkness, I heard footsteps. It was Qari Jamil, on his way to lead the congregation in prayer. Entering the room, he had me stick out my hands, and laced my palms with a few powerful shots. Lines of ice went to my shoulder. The base of my hands turned blue. I accepted the punishment without flinching. Then he let me go.
Once I was let out of jail I went and joined the prayer, thanking God for keeping me on the straight path, the sirat ul mustaqim,