First Grain of Sand — Page 132
116 FIRST GRAIN OF SAND and cause trouble, which I bore with silence. Those days, I con- tinued to restrict my diet to bread with hot water for both meals of the day out of the fear that pork may be getting mixed into the food. I would receive two slices of bread in the morning and two slices again in the evening. This made me quite weak and mal- nourished. The hair on my chest was so fragile that they would fall out even if I just touched them. Hence, when the stocky prisoner began to bother me too much, I once passionately and angrily said: تو کرم حتی ، من شیر حتی [‘You are a worm; I am a lion']—meaning, how can he compete with me when he is a lowly worm and I am a lion. Whenever I would say anything, the spy in the room would quickly ask this stocky prisoner what I said. When the spy asked this time, the prisoner told him that I called him a worm and called myself a lion. The spy immediately reported this up to the administration what I had said today. A day or two later, that spy asked me if it is written in a hadith that when someone dies and is buried, that their grave contains a window that leads to Heaven if their soul was good and leads to Hell if their soul was bad. He said that the many times when they dig up these graves, they have never seen a window that leads to either Heaven or Hell. So, he said, if this hadith is true, then I should explain its meaning to him. I told him the hadith is absolutely true but the grave the hadith refers to is not the physical grave where a dead body is interred. Rather, it is referring to that place where souls are kept after death, where death means the moment when the souls are separated from the body. Once reaching the Hereafter-where God Almighty keeps souls after death—a virtuous soul, who had