The ghost protocol - Hamzair Post Canon Fic Chapter 10 is now in
Asato mā sad gamaya / Tamaso mā jyotir gamaya / Mṛtyor mā amṛtaṃ gamaya — they're all about seeking freedom from different kinds of prisons of the mind.
I haven't written the last chapter yet, but it looks like there will be either two very long chapters or I'll split them up and make it three. Consider this a heads-up: there's still a lot left to tell! Let's see how many chapters I finally settle on. There are going to be more twists and turns.
I can't believe I've written a 33k+ word fic already! Thanks, everyone, for being part of this wild ride. This is the longest fic yet I have ever written ( and it's not complete yet), so all thanks to Dhurandhar!!
He was stumbling backward when someone caught him—must have been Hamza.
After that, his vision failed him, Hamza’s voice receded, and then there was only darkness. What happened next, he couldn't say.
When he opened his eyes, he was inside Khanani's factory.
Everything was so vivid, the sights and sounds and even the machine oil smell, and yet something was very wrong. Someone had turned back time to more than a decade ago.
Iqbal sat behind a desk, almost real..Rehman Bhai stood before him, Hamza was just behind Rehman Bhai, with Donga and Siyahi nearby. Khanani was there too, along with several others whose names he had never quite learned.
He should have been standing among them, beside Hamza.
Instead, he found himself nowhere.
He had no body, no place in the room, he simply existed, suspended at the edge of the scene like a witness who could see what was going on but couldn’t intervene.
The wall behind Iqbal was lined with television screens, all tuned to live news broadcasts of the chaos. People were screaming and running. It could have been anywhere, India? Pakistan? Men, women, and children surged through the chaos, desperate to escape, interviews of terrified people. Violence.. Should be horrifying, right? Some channels carried English commentary that he couldn’t quite follow. Others were in Hindi. He couldn’t read that language, but he knew exactly what they were saying.
He could see the absolute horror in Hamza’s eyes, tears forming at the corners, it’s so strange why he didn’t see it that day.
What was he thinking that night? He was thinking of Hamza and of Rehman Bhai. He imagined how happy both men would be at what seemed, to them, a great success. They could have gone for a ride at night, maybe a visit to one of the restaurants that stay open all night. With Hamza. Wasn’t Rehman Bhai celebrating it? Hadn’t Hamza too joined the chants after Iqbal urged him to?
Was it necessary to praise the Almighty because innocents were being killed in a distant land? He did not know.
“The non-believers”, Iqbal had offered an excuse.
For Uzair, those questions did not occupy his mind then. What he knew was that he wanted to belong—to be part of whatever Rehman Bhai was a part of. He wanted to stand beside him and beside Hamza, to share in their certainty, excitement, and their sense of purpose. After Naeem’s death, Rehman Bhai got some comfort in climbing the siyasati ladder. Or that is what he thought.
But today he saw something that he missed that night - that Hamza was devastated. And he had hatred for the people he was surrounded with.
He had hatred for Uzair Baloch.
That night, Uzair did not care about what was happening on the screen. Means to an end… just means to an end. That was how he considered it—like everything else he had ever done for the gang. The people they kidnapped, the men they threatened, the weapons they manufactured or sold, the deals they brokered, the drugs they transported, all of it was, in his mind, a means to an end. After all, Rehman Bhai gave so much back to the Baloch. Uzair had done the same. They had built schools, distributed rations when families were struggling, and stepped in when people needed help.
At one point, all Uzair wanted was justice for his father and protection for his family. The men who had killed him were powerful, protected by the police and the law. Rehman Bhai had a simple answer: the world was unfair, and he could be unfair too. A little haze, an extra puff of smoke made that lesson easier to accept.
He saw himself on the stairs again, where Hamza was pleading .. ‘yeh galat hai Rehman bhai. … yeh kaun se logon se milke kaam karenge hum.. ‘ Rehman Bhai pushed him off the stairs .. ‘Mujhe sikhayega madar…’ and Hamza went silent.
Uzair wanted to protect both at that moment, did he not try.. Allah… Rehman Bhai was drunk and out of his senses, could Hamza not have tried a better time to speak to him? Rehman Bhai had killed for less, who had ever told him that he was wrong?
But, that day, what if Hamza confided in him?
Would Uzair have understood him? The answer was a very difficult one.
What if Hamza had told him the truth that day in the desert, when they stood so close that his body reacted to his breath.. It was clear—one confession would have forced Uzair to choose between the two men.
Who would he have chosen at that time? There were no clean answers. Allah rehem, choosing could have meant severing all bonds, killing one of them.
How many people had he killed? The chargesheet said two hundred something, it’s possible, he didn’t keep count. And if he added the number of people that were killed that night, in a different country, how many would that be.
But then he realized it had been like a fever dream in the strangest slumber. The next thing he knew, he felt physical pain and found himself back in the tunnel, on Hamza's shoulders, with the animals groaning behind them.
Rehman was long gone. It would be impossible for him to let go of Hamza, and let go of everything that he was offering.
His pain would always stay, but the dilemma had died with Rehman and time had made the choice for him.