“Death is not an end, but a quiet transformation — from breath to dust, and from dust to bloom.”
I had just completed my second fall semester at the university and was preparing to return home after a long absence. My heart should have been light. I was to be engaged to the girl I had loved for many years, my would-be wife, whom I later married. Yet beneath that happiness, a faint melancholy took root, like a shadow without a source. I did not know why, but it seemed as though something heavy and inevitable was drawing near — something that would demand my stillness and grief.
After a long, restless night on the train, I tried to reason with my uneasy mind, but nothing made sense. When I finally reached home, my mother told me that my father was seriously ill and had gone with my brother to Dera Ghazi Khan to see a doctor. He had been suffering from a severe nosebleed. The moment I heard this, my strange melancholy and the news of his illness merged into one indistinguishable feeling — a quiet storm rising within me. An unshakable conviction took hold of my heart: my father was going to die, and there was no escape from that destiny.
I went outside to the courtyard and sat on the ground beneath a tree that my father had planted many years ago. The wind rustled softly through its leaves, as if echoing my grief. Then, all at once, I began to weep — loudly, helplessly, for fifteen long minutes. My mother and sisters came to me, alarmed, but I could only say through sobs, “I am crying because he will not survive.”
After a few hours, my father and brother returned. My father looked pale and utterly exhausted. When his eyes met mine, there was no joy, no tenderness — only a quiet distance, as if he had already begun to walk away from the world. His face was calm, but it carried the silence of something irreversible.
The next morning, his condition worsened. My brother and I took him again to the hospital in Dera Ghazi Khan. The doctor examined him briefly and said he was fine, prescribing some medicine to stop the bleeding. We decided to stay with a relative, about ten kilometres from the city. That evening, my father asked my brother to return home, leaving me to stay with him. I tried to engage him in small talk, brought a newspaper, and even spoke about my upcoming engagement — but he remained quiet, withdrawn, and disinterested. As the sun began to set, he suddenly said, in a low and detached voice, “Death is nothing but a transformation — from one form of matter into another. After death, one becomes fossil, flower, or dust.” Then he fell silent again. I realised he was interpreting death through his lifelong materialist philosophy. It was as though, even at the edge of mortality, he sought meaning not in spirit but in matter. His eyes seemed distant, almost vacant — as if they were searching for something beyond the visible world.
That night, he complained of a severe headache. Our host suggested that he take a Valium 5, which he had long used to help him sleep. My father agreed. Soon, his body relaxed, and he seemed to fall into slumber. I too, weary and anxious, drifted into sleep.
At midnight, I awoke suddenly, seized by a nameless terror. I touched his hand — it was cold. His face felt lifeless, his breathing absent. Panic gripped me. I roused my relative, insisting that we fetch a doctor immediately. There was a comrade doctor in the city — a family friend — but no rickshaw or vehicle could be found at that hour. Only a bicycle. So I took it and pedalled into the dark. The night was bitterly cold, the silence broken only by the barking of distant dogs. I rode through that emptiness with one thought in mind — to bring help. After nearly forty minutes, I reached the doctor’s house and knocked frantically. He came out, his face weary, and said softly that his mother-in-law had died just hours earlier. He could not come, but he promised to visit in two hours.
I returned, my limbs frozen, my mind blank. My father was in the same senseless state. Everyone else in the house slept on, unmoved by the weight of the night. I sat beside him, unable to decide whether he was alive or gone. Two hours passed in a blur. At dawn, the doctor arrived, checked him, and said he should be taken to the hospital. My brother had by then returned. We carried him in a vehicle to the hospital. Within ten minutes, the doctor there declared what my heart already knew: my father was dead.
We brought his body back to our village. My numbness deepened as the women began their ritual wailing — a chorus of grief that seemed both ancient and mechanical. Their cries rose and fell rhythmically, some continuing for hours, their lips moving even when their voices had broken. I watched it all with the detachment of someone watching life from the other side.
That night, I slept deeply for the first time in days. By morning, preparations for the burial began. I overheard someone saying it should be done according to Sunni rituals. A strange thought crossed my mind — how ironic that a man who had lived as a materialist, dismissing religion as illusion, must now be claimed by it in death. Before the burial, an impulse rose within me — to touch him one last time. I went forward, lifted the cloth, and kissed his forehead. It was icy cold. I shivered, as though the chill of death had entered my body.
The next day, after the burial, we returned to Taunsa. I wandered through the narrow streets of my childhood — streets that still carried echoes of my father’s footsteps. Suddenly, a strange, almost electric sensation coursed through my body — an awakening of something raw and physical. I stood still, bewildered, realising that grief, too, has its own dark and mysterious transformations. But perhaps that is another story for another time.