The soul of the sinner advanced stark naked before God. And God opened the book of sinner’s life:
‘Certainly your life has been very bad: You have…(followed a prodigious, marvelous enumeration of sins). Since you have done all that, I am certainly going to send you to Hell.’
‘You can not send me to Hell.’
‘And why can I not send you to Hell?’
‘Because I have lived there all my life.’
Then there was a great silence in the Chamber of God’s Justice.
‘Well, since I can not send you to Hell, I am going to send you to Heaven.’
‘You can not send me to Heaven.’
‘And why can I not send you to Heaven?’
‘Because I have never been able to imagine it.’
And there was a great silence in the Chamber of God’s Justice.
I read this story few years ago & recently I was going through some critical material & I came across it again. Naturally it’s the kind of story that makes one think of life. Life must be so cruel to people that they cannot even imagine as to what is paradise, to begin with. It hurts to read something like this:
‘And why can I not send you to Hell?’
‘Because I have lived there all my life.’
And this one makes it all the more painful:
‘And why can I not send you to Heaven?’
‘Because I have never been able to imagine it.’
No matter where you are & if it’s hell every where you go – then this is more horrific than any story I’ve ever read in the newspapers. It means you can never get rid of the brutal agony that had destroyed you once. Which also means that there cannot be any ray of hope.
If God cannot heal the pain, then who can? Does time really heal the wounds, or is it another myth? A myth that only deceives, cause scars invariably hurt.
Since this story is written by human, naturally the system of justice is just like this world. People have this habit of putting barriers in their own lives, as if the ones created by the world aren’t enough. Imagination knows no boundary & yet when anyone goes ahead, people are shocked beyond measure. It’s sad to know that someone cannot imagine what is beauty or happiness. It’s sad to know that people find something sick, cause it has been called sick or immoral for the past 100 years. It’s sad that people don’t even give themselves room for possibilities.
I don’t say life is a bitch, cause I say life is worth all the trouble. But there are cases in which people may never recover. I cannot experience each & every calamity to know that it exists, but I know for sure that people do get hurt & sometimes they never recover. Sadly, I have nothing to say to them.
- Nadira Rahman
