It happened once upon a time that Mullah Nasruddin was passing a cemetery where he happened to see a freshly dug grave.

“Perhaps,” he thought, “if I lie down in the grave, angels will come down and examine me. As I am feeling rather peaceful at the moment, I might be granted immediate admission to heaven!”

Accordingly, he stretched himself out in the bottom of the grave and waited for the angels to appear. Suddenly, though, he was startled by a tremendous clattering and banging. “The end of the world!” he thought. “Then it must be time to rise from my grave!”

Leaping up from the earth, he discovered that a train of mules laden with pots and pans was jogging past the cemetery. The sudden appearance of the Mullah from the earth startled the animals, and they began to rear and kick and run about. Many of the pots and pans they were carrying were damaged or completely destroyed.

The angry driver of the mules blamed Nasruddin for the disaster, and beat him so severely that he fell backward into the grave again, unconscious.

When at last the Mullah regained consciousness and came staggering home, bruised and with his clothing torn to rags, his friends came to meet him, and said, “Mullah, where have you been? What happened to you?”

“I am coming from the other world,” Nasruddin replied.

“Really? How is it in the other world?”

“It’s all right,” he said, “as long as you don’t scare the mules carrying pots and pans.”