Where Have They All Gone?

By Mesha Oh

“How incredible!” he exclaimed to himself, shaking his head in bewilderment. “Where have they all gone?”

He had been thinking of the millions of human beings, down the centuries, who had come to planet Earth and had then died. What had happened to all of them? Where had they all gone?

They had all been swallowed up by Time, the thought came to his mind. He pictured Time as a huge creature with a cavernous mouth wide open, its massive red-coloured tongue sticking far out. Through a force akin to magnetism, hordes of people were being sucked onto the creature’s tongue, kicking and struggling against their will, and then swallowed up and pushed down into its enormous belly. The creature’s hunger would remain unsatiated till it had succeeded in gobbling up the very last human being. Only then would it shut its mouth!

Of course, that was just his fertile imagination at work, he said to himself, but life was a bit like that, wasn’t it?—with people being whisked off, against their will, from the planet every second while those who remained behind had no confirmed knowledge as to where they had been taken to. The millions upon millions of human beings who had lived on Earth since the dawn of humankind and had died, having spent a couple of decades or whatever it was here—no one had any idea of where (if anywhere) they now were. What had happened to all those emperors and other such so-called ‘history makers’ that he had read about? What about all those great men of science and literature, whom he had studied about in school? What about all those saints and social reformers who were still remembered with much respect and love by millions of people centuries after they had departed from this planet? What about the teeming millions of ‘ordinary’ people all over the inhabited world, whose names were not recorded in written history? What had happened to all of them? Where were they now? No one could say! As far as human beings were concerned, their fate was shrouded in complete ‘unknownness’—a word he thought he had just invented.

The crux of the mystery was what happens to a person after they die. Do they cease to exist, like materialists (who believe we are simply our physical bodies) contend? Or, do they live on, in some other form and realm, as many others believe? It seemed utterly bizarre to him that he didn’t know for sure either way. He had a strong hunch, though, that people do live on even after death, albeit in some different way. But he wasn’t really certain.

But that ignorance was only a matter of around a few years or so at the most, he mused, smiling to himself. One day—sooner or later—he too would die, just like the millions who had already gone forth, down the centuries. And then, that great mystery—of what happens after death—would be automatically cleared for him without his having to make any effort in this regard, as he experienced the phenomenon himself.