Journey with a dead man.

Once upon a time there was a boy who was 12 years old and his father and brother weren't at home so he had to travel alone to pursue his educational dreams, so he traveled with some of his relatives and with a dead body. The journey was very dangerous.  During the journey there was the danger of getting kidnapped by the terrorists and getting mugged by thieves.

Their journey begins and the first destination where they had to reach was Quetta to Boldak. Quetta is the provincial city of Balochistan province of Pakistan. Boldak is a border town and the headquarters of Spin Boldak District in the southern Kandahar province of Afghanistan. On their way there is a mountain called Kotal which is very dangerous place. What the drivers have to do is drive their car round and round around the mountain to reach the top of the mountain and again go round to come down from the mountain. As the car moved round, the boy felt a little nauseous and started vomiting about three to four times due to which he lost much of his strength and when they reached Boldak, his friend bought him a biscuit and a bottle of mineral water and when he ate it he felt a little better.

Now they started their new destination Boldak to Kandahar. This part of the journey was pretty good. It is a little bit dangerous and there are chances that here Taliban might attack but they were lucky that nobody attacked them and they reached there safely.  When they reached Kandahar they took the dead body to a local mosque. And they sat around it. After a few hours they went to the dead man’s sister’s home to have dinner, when they had their dinner they came back to the mosque to take care of the dead body. It was around 11:40pm and it was time to take a nap till 2:30am so they again started their journey at 3:00am. Everybody there started making a circle around the dead body to sleep.

The boy was a little bit afraid of the dead body that night and hardly could sleep one and a half hour and he was thinking of different horrible stories which made him afraid. He was thinking about what if the dead man suddenly woke up. He was thinking what would happen if a haunting and ghostly encounters start that night.

Now it was 2:30am and everybody woke up, washed their faces and started the journey again.

It was a dark and cold morning. It was about 6:45am when they reached Janda, a small village in Ghazni. Ghazni is a province in Afghanistan, it is located in central-east part of the country. On their way their car got a problem due to which they stayed in a small hotel with the dead body outside of the hotel for an hour until the driver got the car fixed. When the driver was fixing the car they started having breakfast in the hotel. For breakfast they had a few boiled eggs and cups of hot tea. The eggs were quite tasty but the cups in which they were drinking their tea weren’t so clean. The boy was thinking what if he gets sick during the journey, as there will be no doctor or clinics.

When the car was fixed, they were ready to start their journey again. They reached Ghazni around 8:30am.  The weather of Ghazni that day was very hot due to which they lifted up the dead body’s coffin’s upper portion so the dead body get cold air and don’t get decomposed.  After two hours of journey, they reached Kabul from Ghazni. When they reached the dead man’s home, they took his body to his house and all his sons,  daughters, his wife and his other relative were crying and screaming. It was a very bad day for the dead man’s family. It also made the boy sad.

And that was the end of the man’s life and the journey of the young boy for future education starts from here. The young boy is very brave because it is very hard to travel alone with a dead body. It is one of the unforgettable moments of his life. And he learned many new things, including that life is pretty hard and we should be brave and strong and overcome all the problems in our life with courage and determination to reach our destiny. We must not give up and must imagine a better life for ourselves and create stories, poems and drawings to capture our dreams.