Umar Hayat Hussain narrates a moving tale of one of the harshest realities of life, death and captures the different meanings it holds.
On a weathered tombstone, half swallowed by moss and time, are carved the words:
“Resting is not an end, but a return.”
Beneath this stone lies John Carloss, a wealthy traveler and merchant who departed this world more than two centuries ago. The cause of his death, as the townspeople recorded, was excessive drunkenness at the age of sixty. Yet to those who remembered fragments of his tale, John Carloss was far more than a man who drank himself to death. He was a wanderer of both lands and thoughts, a man obsessed not with life’s pleasures but with its questions. Alone in his wooden hut at the edge of the forest, beneath a roof that creaked like a weary soul, he would spend his evenings staring into the fire and asking the same two questions that haunted him all his life: