Five Seconds to Go

Five Seconds to Go O nce when I was on a visit to Meerut, I went for a stroll one evening with my host, Maulana Shakeel Ahmed Qasmi. We were walking along the Sadar Baazaar, when, all of a sudden, the whole front of a house just a few yards ahead of us, collapsed without warning, blocking the entire width of the street with debris. We were hardly five seconds away from the scene of this tragic accident. Had we been five seconds faster, or had the house caved in five seconds earlier, there was no way that we could have escaped the accident. Our deaths would have been instantaneous. While we happily imagined that our final destination lay far ahead, our journey would have been cut short in the middle. It occurred to me at that time that man is separated from death by a mere five seconds. At any point in time there is the chance that man will make this five-second journey–and find himself in another world. If only man could quite finally grasp the enormity of the fact that the distance between him, at any given point in his life, and death, could be so infinitesimally short, he would undergo the most amazing metamorphosis; he would continue to live in this world, but his thoughts would then become firmly focused on the life to come. If man could appreciate that he is standing on death’s doorstep, he would then leave the