𝑻𝒂-𝑯𝒂𝒅𝒅-𝒆-𝑰𝒔𝒉𝒒 Chapter 8
FLASHBACK
The room in Ridder dissolved entirely into the stifling, blood-soaked heat of lyari. The smell of cold antiseptic twisted into the heavy stench of salt air, exhaust fumes, and cordite. The darkness of the sedative didn't bring peace; it dragged Hamza down into the stone depths of the Baloch Haveli in Lyari years ago.
The dawn over the haveli that morning had been the color of bruised iron.
Uzair Baloch sat on the edge of the bed, his frame hunched forward, his eyes wide and unblinking. His skin felt completely numb. He didn't know how it was possible—he couldn't remember the last three days. There was only a gray fog in his brain. Had he been drugged? Had someone slipped something into his tea? He couldn't remember falling asleep, yet three whole days had vanished from his life like a excision.
The silence in the haveli, low rumble of police sirens starting to encircle the outer alleys of Lyari. Arshad Pappu is dead. Uzair had beheaded him with his own hands to settle the blood feud, and now the state was coming to collect its due.
But Uzair wasn't thinking about the sirens. He wasn't thinking about the police.
His hands were trembling violently as he stared down at the small, leather-bound book resting open on his knees.
He had woken up searching for Hamza. He had reached out into the empty side of the mattress, his voice raspy as he called out the name of the boy he had shielded from the world. But Hamza wasn't in the kitchen. Hamza wasn't by the courtyard. Hamza was gone. The only thing left behind in the dawn light was this hidden ledger, found pulled from the floorboards near the wardrobe.
Uzair’s breath hitched, his eyes scanned the neat, precise handwriting on the faded pages.
The name at the top of the clearance file didn't say Hamza. It read: Jaskirat Singh Rangi. Undercover Operative, Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW).
The world inside Uzair chest didn't just break; it completely pulverized. The boy he had pulled into his bed, the boy whose quiet sighs had warmed his skin for years, was a phantom. A weapon manufactured in Delhi and pointed directly at his heart.
But the true poison was written deeper in the entries.
Uzair’s thumb smeared the ink as he read the logs from the month Rehman Dakait—his older brother, the man who had been his father, his king, his entire universe—had been killed. Uzair vision blurred with an rage. Days ago, Hamza had come to him with tears in his eyes, whispering that Arshad Pappu men had ambushed Rehman Bhai. Hamza had fed him the names, fed him the coordinates, fed his blinding fury until Uzair had hunted Arshad down and torn him apart, believing he was avenging his brother's blood.
It had all been a calculated lie.
The diary entries laid it out with clinical precision. Target eliminated. Operation Rehman Dakait successful. The coordinates given to the security forces hadn't come from a rival gang. They had been transmitted from inside this very haveli. The ambush hadn't been an act of street warfare; it was a state-sponsored execution.
The enemy hadn't been waiting in the dark alleys of lyari. The enemy had been sleeping flush against his chest, listening to his heartbeat, counting the breaths he took.
Hamza had killed Rehman Bhai. His Hamza. His soft, quiet boy had orchestrated the execution of the only man Uzair had ever truly revered.
A thunderous crash echoed through the haveli as the front iron gates were smashed open. The Lyari police and paramilitary forces flooded the courtyard, their heavy boots thudding against the stone, their weapons cocked as they screamed orders.
"Uzair Baloch! Bahar aao! Haveli ko gher liya gaya hai!"
Inside the room, Uzair didn't move. He didn't even look toward the door as the panel was kicked off splintering into pieces on the floor. A dozen armed officers rushed in, their barrels aimed directly at his forehead, their faces tense with the sheer terror of capturing the kingpin of Lyari.
Uzair slowly closed the leather diary, his fingers lingering on the cover for a fraction of a second before he slid it inside his vest, right next to his heart. He stood up, his frame towering over the nervous policemen. He didn't speak. He didn't utter a single threat or shout a command to his men outside. He was deathly silent.
The officers lunged forward, grabbing his wrists and snapping the heavy steel handcuffs into place with a sharp, echoing clink. They dragged him out of the room, his boots scraping against the stone corridor where he used to watch Hamza walk every morning.
As they hauled him out into the blinding, dusty heat of the courtyard, Uzair looked up at the grey sky, Let them take him to the cells. Let them hang him. The police couldn't do anything to him that hadn't already been done the moment he opened that diary. The love he had carried for years hadn't just died—it had turned into a burning desire for vengeance that would outlive the prison walls.
.☘︎ ݁˖
The runway at the private military airstrip outside Delhi was slick with a midnight downpour, the tarmac reflecting the harsh, blinking amber lights of the tarmac crews. The engines of the unmarked private plane whined down, a low, dying scream as the cabin door hissed open.
A medical team rushed forward, their gurneys cutting through the rain, accompanied by a tense, stone-faced line of R&AW handlers.
When they hauled Hamza out of the cabin, the seasoned operatives at the bottom of the stairs instinctively recoiled. He didn't look like a man who had just successfully executed the final, devastating phase of an deep-cover operation. He didn't look like the asset who had just dismantled the entire hierarchy of Lyari's underworld and severed its terrorist veins from the inside out.
He looked like a corpse that had been dragged through a meat grinder.
He was bloody—bloody hell from head to toe. The crimson stains on his torn clothing weren't just his own; it was the residue of the final, violent collapse of the haveli, the blood of the men he had betrayed, and the visceral cost of his survival. His skin was an ashen, deathly gray beneath the stains. His body had completely given up, entirely devoid of sense or reflex, his muscles twitching with a terrifying, post-traumatic shock as the paramedics cut his boots away.
They lifted him onto the gurney, pinning an oxygen mask over his face, but his lungs were rejecting the air,
Through the thick, chemical fog of his failing vitals and the blinding glare of the runway floodlights, Hamza’s eyes remained half-closed, unseeing and glazed with a panic. He couldn't feel the rain. He couldn't hear the shouting doctors or the sharp, clinical orders being barked by the handlers.
His head rolled to the side, his long, blood-matted hair sticking to his forehead. Beneath the plastic of the oxygen mask, his gray lips were shivering, shattering against each other as he tried to speak.
No words of victory came out. No tactical debrief.
"Uzair..." he whispered, "Uzair..."
It was a dazed, broken chant. With every inch the gurney moved toward the ambulance, his trembling lips formed that single name over and over again, clawing for the only anchor his mind had known for nearly a decade. Even as his consciousness began to entirely fracture, even as his pulse dipped into the red zone, his soul remained trapped in that dawn light in lyari, screaming for the man he had just delivered to the police.
The tires of the ambulance screeched to a halt outside the high-security wing of the base hospital, and the medical team slammed the doors open, wheels rattling violently as they rushed Hamza straight into the Intensive Care Unit. The red lights of the ICU flashed against the sterile white walls, a frantic, high-pitched bleeping echoing from the heart monitors as they hooked his battered body up to the life-support machines.
But within minutes of cutting away the blood-soaked clothes and running the emergency scans, the clinical chaos in the room came to a sudden, dead stop. The head surgeon froze, staring at the ultrasound monitor with wide, disbelieving eyes.
The medical staff wasn't ready for this. Nobody was.
The lead doctor stormed out of the theater, his hands trembling as he grabbed the secure internal line and dialed the direct number of Sushant Bansal—the cold, calculating right-hand man of Ajay Sanyal.
Sushant was sitting in a dim briefing room at headquarters when his encrypted phone buzzed. He picked it up on the first ring, his voice tight. "Bansal here. Is the asset stable?"
"Sir, we have a massive complication," the doctor gasped into the receiver, "We just ran the full-body diagnostics. Your asset... Jaskirat is expecting. He is pregnant."
The silence on the other end of the line was deafening. Sushant Bansal, a man who had planned black-ops missions for decades, felt the breath completely leave his lungs. "What did you just say?"
"He is pregnant, Sir," the doctor repeated, "And given the amount of physical trauma, the blood loss, and the systemic shock his body has just endured, the situation is critical. We don't know if we can save the pregnancy. It is an extremely high-risk situation, and honestly, right now, we are fighting just to keep Jaskirat himself alive. We are doing everything we can... we hope we can save it, but you need to notify the Chief immediately."
Inside the ICU, completely oblivious to the panic he had just caused the agency, Hamza lay beneath the blinding white lights. Tubes fed fluids into his torn veins, and an oxygen mask fogged up with his shallow breaths. His body was a battleground of scars and fresh blood, but beneath theheavy linen sheet, the tiny life—the consequence of those nights under the haveli quilt—was fighting a silent, desperate war to stay tethered to the world.
The doors of the conference room at R&AW headquarters remained firmly shut. Inside, Ajay Sanyal sat at the head of a table, presiding over a tense, late-night briefing with top-tier intelligence officials. Maps of the subcontinent were projected onto the wall, and the air was thick with the discussion of geopolitical strategy. Sanyal looked immaculate—not a single wrinkle in his suit, his mask of control.
Suddenly, the door clicked open.
Sushant Bansal stepped into the room. His face was entirely pale, his breathing shallow, a stark contrast to the rigid discipline usually maintained in these quarters. He didn't wait for the meeting to conclude. He didn't even acknowledge the other officials at the table. He walked straight down the length of the room, his eyes locked onto Sanyal,
Sanyal raised a eyebrow, his hand pausing over his leather notebook. He recognized that look on his right-hand man's face. It was the look of a crisis that couldn't wait for a protocol.
Sanyal slowly stood up, adjusting his cuffs with practiced calmness. "Excuse me, gentlemen," he said smoothly to the room, "Give us a moment."
He walked toward the far corner of the room, stepping into a recessed, soundproof alcove near the velvet curtains. Bansal followed him closely, his shadow falling against the wood paneling as he pulled the Chief entirely out of earshot of the other officials.
"What is it, Sushant?" Sanyal asked softly, "Jaskirat extraction was successful. The plane landed twenty minutes ago. Why do you look like you’ve seen a ghost?"
Bansal swallowed hard, He leaned in close, his voice trembling slightly as he delivered the news the agency was entirely unprepared for.
"Sir... it's about Jaskirat," Bansal whispered, his eyes darting back toward the table to ensure no one was listening. "The hospital just called from the ICU. They were prepping him for emergency surgery to treat the internal trauma from the Lyari. Sir... the doctors ran the blood work and the scans. They found something else."
Sanyal’s eyes narrowed, his gaze turning sharp. "Speak clearly, Bansal. What did they find? Is the asset going to survive?"
"Yes, Sir, but... Jaskirat is expecting," Bansal breathed out, "He is pregnant, Sir. Nearly two months. The doctors say the physical trauma from the lyari operation has put him in a highly critical, high-risk state. They are fighting to stabilize his vitals right now, but they don't know if the child will survive the night."
For the first time in his career, Ajay Sanyal’s face completely froze. The child belonged to Uzair Baloch. The child of India most deeply embedded ghost was the bloodline of the kingpin they had just locked in a cell.
Sanyal looked past Bansal’s shoulder, staring blankly out the rain-streaked window at the dark Delhi night, his mind instantly mapping out the legal, political, and operational nightmare that had just landed on his desk.
"Make sure they save Jaskirat," Sanyal commanded, "And if possible... the baby also." Sanyal turned back to the window, his eyes reflecting the flashing amber lights of the distant runway through the pouring rain. A child of Jaskirat bloodline—and Uzair Baloch's lineage.
Against every medical odd, through the hours of that stormy midnight, both Jaskirat and the tiny, fragile life inside him remained safe. The monitors continued their rhythmic, shallow bleeping, tethering them both to the living world. But the victory was precarious. The lead surgeon stepped out of the ICU, wiping the cold sweat from his forehead as he delivered the grim warning to Bansal: the internal trauma was severe, the organs were bruised, and the bleeding was barely contained under the dosage of clotting agents. It was an exceptionally high-risk survival.
For one whole week, the asset remained suspended in a deep, medically induced coma.
When Hamza finally cracked his eyes open seven days later, the harsh, white glare of the ICU lights hit his pupils. He let out a low, ragged gasp. A nurse immediately rushed to his bedside, her hands gentle but firm as she supported his shoulders, helping him shift upward into a sitting position against the pillows.
Hamza didn't look at her. He didn't look at the tubes extending from his arms, or the monitors surrounding near his bed. His gaze was entirely hollow, fixed blankly on the blue cotton of the hospital blanket over his knees.
The door of the private room clicked open. Ajay Sanyal walked in, his tailored suit immaculate as always, with Sushant Bansal following a half-step behind him like a shadow. Sanyal pulled a steel chair closer to the bed, sitting beside the asset in complete silence.
"Jaskirat," Sanyal spoke softly, "Can you hear me?"
No response. Hamza remained still, his hair falling forward, shadowing his face. He didn't blink. He didn't adjust his posture.
Bansal leaned forward slightly, "Jaskirat Singh Rangi. Look at the Chief."
Nothing. The name didn't register. It didn't spark a single twitch in his fingers or a shadow of recognition in his glazed eyes. It was as if the agency had spent eight years polishing a identity that had now completely dissolved in the blood of the Lyari haveli. He genuinely did not know who Jaskirat was anymore. That person had been left behind in Pakistan, buried under the rubble of his own betrayal.
Sanyal observed the hollow shell before him, his eyes narrowing as he realized the depth of the psychological collapse. The firewall hadn't just cracked; the asset had completely wiped his own ledger to survive the guilt.
Sanyal leaned in a fraction closer, "Hamza," Sanyal called out quietly.
A sudden, sharp shudder ran through Hamza’s shoulders. At the sound of that name—the name Uzair had whispered into his hair in the dark, the name that belonged to the kitchen of the haveli and the quilts of his stolen life—Hamza slowly raised his head. His trembling lips parted, his eyes finally tracking toward Sanyal face as he gave a weak, barely audible whisper of acknowledgment. He was Hamza now. Jaskirat was dead, and only the ghost of Lyari remained.
"Hamza," Sanyal spoke, "Hamza, mere taraf dekho. We have news for you. Mera taraf dekho, sab theek hai."
Slowly, deliberately, Sanyal reached across and took Hamza’s hand into his own.
The contact made Hamza flinch, but he didn't pull away. He just kept looking down, his head bowed under the weight of an grief as tears dropped from his lower lashes, hitting the blue hospital blanket in. They wouldn't stop. The tears came silently, non-stop, tracking through his cheeks.
In his mind, his hands weren't clean. He looked at his fingers resting in Sanyal grip and all he could see was blood—blood everywhere. Uzair’s blood. Rehman Bhai’s blood. The blood of every boy from the Lyari alleys who had ever smiled at him or called him brother.
He couldn't stay in this white, air-conditioned room. With every blink, his mind violently dragged him right back to the Baloch Haveli.
In his head, it was just another Karachi dawn. The sun would be rising over the courtyard, turning the dust to gold, and Uzair would be shifting under the quilt, waking up with that deep, raspy grunt. Uzair will need his daily tea, Hamza thought frantically, his fingers twitching inside Sanyal's palm. I have to go to the kitchen. The gas burner needs to be lit. I have to make the strong ginger chai just the way he likes it, then the parathas... if the oil isn't hot enough, the layers won't be crispy. And the laundry... Uzair kameez are still sitting in the bucket, I have to carry them up to the rooftop to get them dry before the midday heat hits.
An panic seized his throat. I have so much work to do. Why am I lying here? Uzair is going to call out for me. He’s going to ask where his clothes are. I need to get up—
"Hamza," Sanyal’s voice cut through the Karachi Sanyal tightened his grip on hamza trembling, blood-stained hand, forcing his consciousness back into the sterile ICU. "Suno mera baat. You are expecting."
The words didn't make sense at first. They hovered in the space between them,
Hamza’s breathing stopped. The frantic rhythm of the heart monitor beside the bed spiked, a
bleeping breaking the quiet of the room. The image of the Lyari rooftop, clothes, and the steaming ginger tea dissolved into nothingness.
For the very first time since he had opened his eyes, Hamza slowly raised his head. He pulled his gaze away from the blanket, He looked at his handler properly, fully absorbing the expression of the man who held his entire life in a leather notebook.
His hand went entirely cold inside Sanyal's grip. His trembling lips parted, but no sound came out. Inside the empty, bleeding hollow of his chest, a beautiful reality began to take root—a piece of Uzair had survived the fire.
Hamza’s gaze remained locked on Sanyal’s face, his glassy eyes searching the Chief any sign that this was a psychological tactic—a lie designed to break him completely or manipulate his compliance. But Sanyal just sat there, his fingers still anchoring Hamza hand, Hamza gaze drifted downward.
His hand rose from the bed moving with a hesitation, as if he were approaching a live wire. His fingers scarred flattened against his own lower abdomen, pressing through the coarse blue fabric of the hospital gown.
The math crashed through his mind , Two months ago, the haveli had been whole. Two months ago, Uzair had come back from the Lyari docks late at night, his skin smelling of tobacco and rain, and had dragged Hamza into his arms beneath the heavy quilt, whispering into his hair as if the world outside their bedroom didn't exist. That baby had been conceived in the absolute depths of their stolen peace, long before the sirens, long before the diary had been pulled from the floorboards, and long before Uzair hands had been snapped into handcuffs.
A soft, choked gasp tore out of Hamza’s throat—a sound of agony mixed with a sudden protectiveness. "M-Mera..." Hamza stammered, His fingers clawed into the cotton of his gown, as he drowned in his own tears. "Uzair ka...?"
Sanyal didn't flinch. He slowly released Hamza hand and leaned back in his chair,
"Yes, Hamza. It is his," Sanyal said softly, "But Uzair Baloch is currently sitting cell in Pakistan. He is a state prisoner. He is never walking out of that cage alive, and he knows exactly who you are now. The identity of Jaskirat Singh Rangi is compromised, and the identity of Hamza is a ghost that cannot exist in lyari anymore."
Sanyal leaned forward, resting his elbows on the edge of the mattress, "This child is highly critical. The doctors told us the internal bleeding nearly ended everything. If you keep crying like this, if your heart rate doesn't settle, your body will reject the pregnancy. Do you understand me? You are fighting for two lives now."
At the word reject, Hamza’s entire posture froze. The sobbing stopped instantly, trapped behind a wall of terror. He forced his breathing to slow down, his chest shuddering as he desperately tried to quiet the erratic rhythm of the monitor. He couldn't let his body fail. He couldn't let the agency claim this final, innocent piece of his past.
"Sir..." Hamza whispered, looking up at Sanyal "Sir, mujhe... mujhe yahan se le jaiye. Mujhe Delhi mein nahi rehna. Mujhe yeh hosh nahi chahiye. Mujhe bas... mujhe iss bachhe ko bachana hai."
Sushant Bansal stepped forward from the shadows near the door, "Sir, if we keep him in India, the medical logs, the internal security clearance... it will create a paper trail. If the story leaks to Islamabad, the Baloch clans will hunt him to the ends of the earth."
Sanyal stood up, turning his back to the bed as he stared out the window toward the rain-slicked base. His mind was already moving the pieces across the board, calculating the cost of a ruined asset and an unborn child.
"We pave a path out," Sanyal murmured, "We give him a pension, a medical file under lock and key, and a destination where nobody asks questions. Somewhere cold enough to bury the heat of Karachi."
He turned back around, looking down at Hamza, who was still clutching his stomach on the bed,
"You will leave the country the moment you are stable enough to travel, Hamza," Sanyal commanded softly. "You will go to a town called Ridder, in the east of Kazakhstan. You will live there. No names from your past, no contact with the old life. You will take the psychiatric medication Dr. Petrova prescribes, and you will carry this child in silence. If you survive the high-risk clearance... the agency will ensure the birth paperwork is handled legally."
Hamza didn't care about the exile. He didn't care about the freezing Kazakh winter or the permanent isolation. He just looked down at his trembling fingers pressed against his skin, his mind whispering: 'Main isko marne nahi doonga, Uzair. Main isko bacha loonga.'
It was desperate foolishness to think Hamza could just pick up his life and fly across the borders. He couldn't even take a single step out of that hospital bed without his knees buckling under him. His physical body was a ruined cage, but his mind was in an even more terrifying state—fractured, untethered, and slipping deeper into a unresolvable psychosis.
He never left India. The paperwork for Kazakhstan sat gathering dust in Sanyal drawer because the asset was physically and mentally disintegrating right before their eyes.
By the fourth month, the medical wing was thrown into absolute chaos during a routine ultrasound. The technician had frozen, adjusting the probe as two distinct, rhythmic thuds echoed through the monitor speaker.
It wasn't one child. It was twins.
A double pregnancy in a body already devastated by bullet wounds, internal hemorrhaging, and severe nerve trauma wasn't just high-risk—it was practically a death sentence. The doctors panicked. Hamza physical and mental state was deteriorating so fast that keeping both his vitals and the twins' heartbeats stable was becoming an impossible tightrope walk.
Hamza tried. God knew he tried his best to survive. He forced himself to swallow the food, tried his eyes shut to give his straining heart some rest, but his mind refused to grant him sanctuary.
The moment his eyes closed , the hospital room vanished, and the ghosts of Lyari came screaming back to tear him apart.
He would see Rehman —his commanding presence, the man who had treated Hamza like his own blood—looking down at him with bullet holes in his chest, asking why he had trusted him. He would see Ulfat Bhabhi, the woman who had become his second mother in that haveli, the one who used to feed him sweet milk when he was tired. I took Rehman from her, Hamza mind would scream in the dark, his soul burning with a guilt. I tore her world apart. I am a killer. I am a monster.
And then, Uzair would appear. Uzair, who had loved him like the very air he breathed. Uzair, who had held him under the quilt, completely blind to the snake coiled against his chest.
The horror was too much for his anatomy to bear. Hamza couldn't eat anything. The mere smell of the hospital trays made his stomach churn. He spent his days and nights curled over a basin, choking and puking until his throat bled, his body rejecting every calorie, every nutrient, and every single pill tried to administer. He is starving himself and the twins to death from the weight of his own conscience.
After a grueling night where Hamza’s blood pressure plummeted into the danger zone, the chief medical officer called an emergency closed-door meeting with Ajay Sanyal and Sushant Bansal.
The lead doctor slammed Hamza rapidly thickening file onto the desk,
"He is not going to make it to full term, Chief," the doctor said, "His body is in a state of chronic, systemic shock. He is rejecting the food, he is rejecting the sedatives, and his mind is actively tearing his vitals to pieces. Medicine cannot fix this anymore. We have altered the dosages, we have tried every psychiatric stabilizer in the inventory, and nothing is working."
Sanyal sat perfectly still, "Then what do you suggest, Doctor? We cannot lose the asset, and we cannot lose those children."
The doctor looked straight into Sanyal eyes, delivering a verdict that shattered every protocol the agency possessed.
"He needs his husband, Sir. He needs the father of those children. Hamza’s brain is locked in a trauma loop, and the only anchor that can pull his subconscious out of this hell is the man he belongs to. If you want Jaskirat to survive this pregnancy, you need to bring Uzair Baloch into this room. No medicine in the world can save him now—only that man can."
"That is never going to happen," Sanyal’s voice cut through the doctor’s office, Bring Uzair Baloch—the most prized prisoner of war currently sitting in a black-site cell, the man who would tear Delhi apart with his bare hands if he ever broke loose—into a civilian hospital to comfort the operative who had destroyed him? It was an operational impossibility. It was a breach of national security that no government would ever authorize. Sanyal didn't even look up from his papers as he dismissed the medical team's plea. The agency would rely on machines, on restraints, on artificial feeds. They would treat Hamza like a broken machine that just needed to be held together until delivery.
But a human body cannot be managed like an administrative ledger.
By the sixth month, the wall that Hamza had built using pure willpower completely shattered.
It happened in the dead of a night. The air in the private ICU room was thick, the silence broken only by the rhythmic, shallow breathing of a half-conscious Hamza. He was curled into his usual fetal position, his hands clutching his swollen stomach, trapped in a dazed, feverish nightmare where Uzair was screaming his name through the iron bars of cell.
Suddenly, a sharp blade of agony ripped through Hamza’s lower abdomen.
He didn't just wake up—he let out a strangled gasp, his back arching off the mattress as his eyes flew open, glazed with terror. The heart monitor beside his bed immediately spiked, its slow bleeping turning into scream of sirens.
"U-Uzair..." Hamza choked out, his fingers clawing wildly into the hospital sheets. "Uzair... nahi......"
Before he could even call for the nurse, he felt it. A gushing warmth flooded the bed, soaking through the blue cotton of his hospital gown, turning the pristine white into a expanding lake of dark crimson. The internal organs, already bruised and bleeding from the Lyari , had finally succumbed to the stress of his collapse.
The bleeding wouldn't stop. It poured out of him like water, draining the very life force from his veins.
The door to the ICU was kicked open, and a swarm of nurses and doctors flooded the room in a blur of panic. The alarms were blaring across the entire floor.
"He’s hemorrhaging! Get the clotting factors! Prepare the operating theater now!"
"The fetal heart rates are dropping! We are losing them! We are losing them both!"
Hamza lay flat, the blinding surgical lamps overhead spinning in violent, sickening circles as the medical team frantically wheeled his gurney down the corridor. He could feel his body going completely numb, the sense leaving his limbs as his blood pressure plummeted into a fatal abyss.
Through the tears tracking non-stop down his temples, he looked down at his own hands. They were covered in it. The blood of his children—the twins who had been the only beautiful thing left from his stolen life, the only living proof that Uzair had loved him—was slipping through his fingers, washed away on a sterile steel gurney.
"Sorry... sorry, hum bacha nahi paaye..."
The voice of an agency medic cut through the roaring in his ears as they slammed the doors of the theater shut.
In that blinding, , beneath the gaze of the staff, the expected tragedy finally took its toll. The hemorrhage took everything. The twins—too small, too fragile, and too broken by the weight of their father's guilt—could not hold onto the world anymore.
Hamza’s eyes slowly closed as the anesthesia was forced into his mask, his lips shivering one last time against the plastic, whispering the only name that had ever mattered into the darkening fog.
The blinding, blood-slicked chaos of the operating theater eventually gave way to a cold, clinical silence. They cleaned him. They washed the crimson stains from his skin, changed the linens, and wheeled his hollowed-out frame back into the private room, hooking him right back up to the artificial lifelines that kept his heart beating against his own will.
When the door clicked open, Ajay Sanyal walked in alone.
For the first time since Jaskirat had been recruited into the service, the Chief's face was completely altered. Sanyal’s eyes were hollow— empty, as if the weight of the tragedy on that steel operating table had finally burned through his armor, leaving nothing behind. He looked like a man who had successfully won a war but lost his own soul in the ledger.
Sanyal walked slowly toward the side of the bed. He reached out and placed his hand on Hamza forehead, his fingers swaying slightly, a rare, gesture of quiet, desperate mourning from a handler to his broken boy.
Hamza didn't flinch. He didn't move a single muscle. His head was turned toward the window, his eyes staring fixedly at the gray sky outside. And that was where he stayed.For one straight year,
Hamza remained pinned to that hospital bed. He never spoke a word. Not a single sound, not a whimper, not a gasp ever passed his shivering gray lips again. The voice that had once sung lullabies in the lyari haveli and whispered secrets to the kingpin of Lyari had completely vanished into the ether. He js a living corpse, entirely checked out from a world that had stolen his salvation.
The only thing that moved was his hand. Permanently, instinctively, his fingers remained rested flat over his stomach—clutching the empty space where they used to be, as if his subconscious was still trying to shield the ghosts of the children he couldn't save.
He couldn't function. Food couldn't be given to him normally; the mere sight of a tray would cause his throat to constrict, so the nurses fed him entirely through clear plastic tubes and bags of medicine dripping directly into his veins. Sleep, too, was an artificial construct. Left to his own devices, his eyes would stay wide open for days, staring blankly out the window, so the darkness had to be forced into his system through the sedatives Dr into his IV line every evening.
He was a ghost trapped in a high-security ward, held together by nothing but steel needles, synthetic nutrients, and a grief so profound that even the agency's parameters had no words left to measure it.
That was how twelve months bled away inside the ward. A full year of artificial light, dripping IV bags, and the silent rhythm of a ghost who refused to return to the living. When his physical wounds finally closed into scars, the agency quietly moved him. He was transferred to a secluded, high-walled bungalow on the outskirts of the capital—a safehouse masked as a private residence, where a dedicated medical staff watched over him around the clock, changing his linens, monitoring his feeds, and forcing the sedatives into his veins when the sun dipped below the horizon.
Yet, the routine of the agency didn't change. Every single evening, without fail, Ajay Sanyal and Sushant Bansal would arrive at the house. They would step out of their unmarked car, bypass the guards in the courtyard, and sit in the quiet of Hamza room, watching the boy stare blankly at the walls.
Until one night.
The rain was drumming softly against the glass panes of the bungalow when Sanyal and Bansal stepped through the front corridor. They reached the threshold of Hamza bedroom, their shoes silent against the rug. But as Sanyal reached out to turn the doorknob, his fingers froze.
From inside the dimly lit room, a sound cut through the silence.
It was a voice. Low thin from a year of disuse, but unmistakable. Hamza was speaking.
Bansal’s eyes widened in shock, his hand instinctively moving toward his jacket, but Sanyal raised a hand, commanding stillness. The two men stood paralyzed in the doorway, peerless shadows hidden by the dark corridor, staring through the crack of the half-open door.
The room was bathed in the soft, amber glow of a single bedside lamp. Hamza wasn't looking out the window. For the first time , he was sitting up on his own, his back supported by the headboard. His hair fell wildly over his shoulders, and his hollow face was tilted slightly downward, a soft beautiful expression softening the sharp lines of his jaw.
There was no one in the room. The rocking chair in the corner was completely empty. The space beside his mattress was vacant.
But Hamza was looking directly at the empty space beside his pillow, his hand lifting gently from his stomach to pat the air with a slowness.
"Suno..." Hamza whispered, a tiny, fragile smile breaking through the exhaustion on his face, "Aap itni der se aaye... chai thandi ho gayi hai. Maine adrak thoda zyaada dala tha, aapke sar dard ke liye."
Hamza leaned forward slightly, his eyes tracking something invisible as it moved across the bed sheets. He pulled his knees toward his chest, leaving a gap on the mattress right next to his hip—the exact space where someone used to rest.
"Nahi, Uzair... gussa mat kijiye," Hamza murmured softly, his eyelashes fluttering as tears began to track down his cheeks, though his smile never faded. "Bhabhi ne kaha tha aaj mausam kharab hoga, isliye maine aapka kameez pehle hi utar liya hai. Sab saaf hai. Aap kapde badal lijiye..."
He paused, tilting his head as if listening to a whisper that only his fractured mind could detect. He let out a small, trembling sigh, his hand gently dropping back onto his lower abdomen, his fingers curving inward to protect the weight that had been stolen from him six months prior.
"Hum theek hain," Hamza whispered into the empty, quiet air "Aap aagaye na... bas, ab sab theek hai. Ab humein koi nahi dhoond payega."
In the hallway, Sushant Bansal slowly looked over at his Chief, "Sir..." he breathed out in a barely audible whisper. "He's... he's completely gone. The firewall didn't just crack. He's living in a hallucination."
Ajay Sanyal didn't answer immediately. He stood perfectly still in the shadows of the doorframe,
"Let him speak, Sushant," Sanyal commanded, "Don't open the door. Just... listen."
The rain outside the safehouse intensified, heavy drops drumming against the glass like a frantic heartbeat, as Hamza shifted slightly on the mattress. He turned his face fully toward the empty pillow beside him, his eyes wide and completely glazed with that dazed innocence. He reached out, his fingertips gently smoothing down the crumpled white sheet, feeling a warmth that existed only in the fractured spaces of his mind.
"Suniye naa..." Hamza whispered, his voice rising in a soft, melodic lilt that belonged entirely to a boy who was still safe in the arms of his husband. He tilted his head, a small smile touching his lips as he rested his cheek closer to the pillow. "Agar ladki huyi toh kya naam rakhenge hum?"
He paused, His hand traveled back down to his stomach, his fingers spreading across his flat abdomen, protecting the twins who had already been buried in a graveyard six months ago.
"Mera dil kehta hai ek ladka aur ek ladki hogi... bilkul aap jaisa aankhein hongi unki," he murmured,
Then, the fragile smile faltered. The line between his beautiful illusion and the deep, suffocating grief beneath his skin began to blur. He clutched the fabric of his gown right over his
"Kab aayenge yeh dono milne humse...?" Hamza sobbed softly, "Ab intezar nahi hota mujhe. Sanyal sir kehte hain woh theek hain... par woh mujhe unse milne nahi dete. Mujhe unhein dekhna hai, Uzair. Mujhe unhein apni jaan se lagana hai."
He looked back up at the empty room, "Ab... ab jaldi aane ko kahiye na unhein," he begged the empty space, "Aap unse kahiye na ki unka Baba yahan akele ro raha hai... unhein kahiye jaldi aayein..."
In the hallway, Bansal couldn't bear it anymore. He slowly turned his face away from the door, unable to look at the ruin of their top asset.
Ajay Sanyal remained frozen in the shadows. His hand was still resting on the brass doorknob, but he didn't push it open. He stood there, his eyes fixed on the boy who was begging a ghost to bring back his dead children,
The sharp click of the brass latch sounded like a gunshot in the quiet room.
The moment the door swung open and the shadows of Ajay Sanyal and Sushant Bansal spilled across the floorboards, the illusion shattered. Hamza went completely, deathly quiet. The frantic rocking stopped instantly. The soft, tender lilt in his voice vanished as if it had never existed, trapped back behind the walls of his trauma.
He didn't scream. He didn't look up in panic. Slowly, he pulled his arms back toward his own body, his hair falling forward like a dark shroud as he lowered his chin, his eyes locking back onto the blue blanket over his knees.
Sanyal walked in with slow steps, He walked straight to the side of the bed, slowly sat on the edge of the mattress,
He looked at the hamza trembling shoulders,
"Hamza," Sanyal said softly, He reached out, his hand hesitating for a second before he laid it gently over Hamza fingers. "Hamza... kisse baat kar rahe thay? Batao humein bhi."
Bansal stood at the foot of the bed, his eyes tracking the shallow rise and fall of the Hamza chest. For a minute, the only sound in the room was the steady, rhythmic patter of the rain against the windowpane.
Hamza didn't raise his head. He didn't look at the hand Sanyal had placed over his own. His fingers remained perfectly still beneath his handler's grip, flat against the empty, scarred hollow of his stomach.
Slowly, Hamza just shook his head.
It was a tiny, definitive movement—a refusal to let the agency touch the only thing he had left. He wouldn't give them Uzair's name. He wouldn't give them the twins. In the wreckage of his mind, he drew the line right there. They had taken his life, his husband, and his children; they were not allowed to take his hallucination.
Sanyal watched the slow shake of his head,
"Hamza," Sanyal asked softly, "Kaha dekh rahe ho? Koyi hai wahan?"
Hamza didn't answer. He didn't even blink.
His eyes were fixed completely to his right, staring intensely at the empty pocket of space right beside his hip. To Sanyal and Bansal, there was nothing there but the rumpled white cotton of the bedsheets and the dim,
But Hamza’s gaze was tracking a very specific movement.
In his mind, the sheet wasn't empty. Uzair was sitting right there, his frame sinking into the mattress, his hand reaching out to gently brush a strand of damp hair away from Hamza forehead.
The corners of Hamza’s lips twitched slightly, a tiny, dazed ghost of a smile appearing for a fraction of a second before vanishing just as fast.
He didn't turn his head back to look at Sanyal. He kept his eyes locked on the space to his right, his hand over his stomach relaxing just a bit, as if he were silently telling the phantom beside him to stay hidden, to stay quiet, because the men from Delhi were in the room. He didn't say a single word, but the certainty in his unblinking eyes said everything: to Hamza, he wasn't alone in that room anymore.
As the monsoon bled into the dry Delhi winter, the nightly visits from Ajay Sanyal and Sushant Bansal took a turn that neither man was operationally or emotionally prepared for. The quiet conversations Hamza used to have with his phantom husband began to shift. The hallucination was growing, expanding, and pulling him deeper into a world the agency could no longer control.
It wasn't the same every night anymore.
Some evenings, the door would click open, and Sanyal and Bansal would find Hamza completely detached from the physical reality of his bed. His physical strength, long drained by months of medical feeds and trauma,
Hamza wasn't sitting still. He was up on his feet, his bare toes tapping lightly against the polished wooden floorboards of the safehouse. He was moving around the bed, his hair swaying behind him, his arms extended in front of him as his fingers curved around thin air. His face was bright, lit up by a dazed, laughter that sounded entirely alien in the sterile,
"Rukoo... rukoo!" Hamza laughed, He took a sudden, quick step toward the armchair, his eyes darting downward as if tracking two tiny, hyperactive figures weaving around his ankles.
"Bachha, kidhar ja rahe ho?" he called out, a soft completely oblivious to Sanyal and Bansal standing frozen in the doorway. "Baba itna daur nahi sakte... suniye, rukiyee!"
He dropped to his knees right there on the hard floor, his hospital gown pooling around him as he reached under the edge of the bedsheet
"Ajao... chalo jaldi, sone ka waqt ho gaya," Hamza whispered into the empty space beneath the mattress, his face softening ,He gathered the empty air against his chest, cradling it gently as he stood back up, rocking his arms in a slow, rhythmic lullaby. "Agar aap dono abhi nahi soye... toh aapke Abbu aakar gussa karenge. Chalo, Baba ki jaan, jaldi se let jao."
He walked back to the pillows, carefully setting down the invisible weight, smoothing out the blanket over nothingness
In the doorway, Ajay Sanyal’s posture remained perfectly rigid, but his eyes were heavier than they had ever been in his years of service. He watched the asset—the man who had single-handedly brought down the Lyari underworld—completely reduced to playing hide-and-seek with the ghosts of the children they had let him lose.
The illusion of peace never lasted. The gentle Karachi dawns, the smell of ginger tea, and the laughter of phantom children were always just a temporary shelter before the black-site reality of what he had done came crashing back through his fractured mind.
One freezing mid-winter night, the door of the safehouse didn't open to the sound of laughter.
As Sanyal and Bansal stepped onto the threshold, they were hit by a sound of terror—a raw, choked screaming that made Bansal’s hand instantly fly to the light switch. But the room was dark, illuminated only by the frantic amber flashes of the lightning outside.
Hamza wasn't rocking his children. He was on his knees in the center of the mattress, his fingers clawing violently at his own chest, tearing at the blue hospital gown until the fabric shredded in his grip. His face was soaked in sweat and non-stop tears, his hair matted to his forehead as he stared into the corner of the room,
"Uzair... Uzair! Main waisa nahi karna chahta tha!" Hamza screamed into the empty voice cracking and breaking into a ragged shriek. He reached his hands out, palms flat, begging the empty air as if a shadow were standing over him, looking down with accusing, bleeding eyes.
"Uzair, suno... main humare bachhon ko bachana chahta tha! Meri galti nahi tha, Uzair! Meri galti nahi tha!"
He collapsed forward onto his hands, his forehead slamming against the mattress as he wept, In his head, Uzair was turning his back on him. Uzair was walking out of the haveli bedroom, leaving him alone in the ruins.
"Uzair, suno... chhod kar mat jao! Uzair!" Hamza choked, gasping for breath as he dragged himself across the sheets toward the edge of the bed, reaching for the empty space. He clutched his own throat, "Mera... mera dam ghut raha hai yahan... Uzair, mera dam ghut raha hai..."
He twisted his head around, finally catching the silhouettes of Sanyal and Bansal standing in the frame. To Hamza, they weren't his handlers anymore—they were the faceless, clinical monsters who had torn his life apart.
"Yeh loog... yeh sab... mujhe mera kuch theek nahi lag raha, Uzair!" Hamza shrieked, scrambling backward on the bed until his spine hit the headboard, pulling his knees tightly against his chest, shielding his empty stomach. He looked back at the empty space beside him, begging the shadow with a terror. "Uzair... mujhe... mujhe chupa lo! Mujhe inhein nahi dekhna, Uzair... mujhe apne paas chupa lo..."
In the doorway, Sushant Bansal took a step forward, his hand trembling. "Chief... his vitals, his oxygen levels are dropping. He’s having a severe panic attack, we need to call the medical team—"
"Stay back, Sushant," Sanyal commanded, He stood frozen in the dark, watching the boy who had once been his finest soldier completely lose his breath, begging a ghost to hide him from the very country he had sacrificed his sanity to serve.
The freezing Delhi winter slowly bled into another scorching summer, and then back into the heavy monsoon rains. For one whole year, it went exactly like this. Hamza remained trapped in the pendulum of his own shattered psyche—some nights laughing and playing with the twins who weren't there, and other nights screaming into the dark, suffocating from the guilt, begging Uzair to hide him from the agency.
His physical body was held together only by the constant, clinical intervention of the staff, but his mind had completely left India.
Then came a quiet night. The rain was hitting the windowpane in a dull, steady rhythm.
Ajay Sanyal entered the bedroom alone. He didn't bring Bansal this time. The Director looked older; the heavy lines around his eyes had deepened into permanent ruts, and his signature crisp posture was weighed down by the tragedy of the asset sitting before him.
Hamza was back to his quiet state. He was sitting up against the headboard, his eyes fixed blankly on the white sheets, his fingers resting over his flat stomach. He didn't acknowledge the click of the door.
Sanyal walked over and pulled up the chair, sitting closer to the bed than he ever had before. For a long time, he just watched Hamza breathe. Then, slowly, Sanyal reached out and placed his hand over Hamza knuckles. "Hamza," Sanyal spoke,
Hamza’s eyelashes flutters, but he didn't look up.
"Suno," Sanyal continued, squeezing his hand gently "You will move to Kazakhstan now, Hamza. The paperwork is done. The house in Ridder is ready for you. It’s quiet there... the snow covers everything. There are no reminders. No Delhi, no lyari."
Hamza remained still, but his fingers twitched slightly under Sanyal palm.
Sanyal leaned in closer, his eyes searching hamza face. "There is a doctor there. Dr. Petrova. She is waiting for you. She will treat you, Hamza... and you will get better. I promise."
It was the first time the Director of R&AW had ever made a personal promise to an asset. It wasn't an operational guarantee; it was a desperate, human wish to save the boy from the living hell inside his own skull. Sanyal knew that India was killing him. Every corner of this country held the ghost of the mission, and every shadow reminded him of the children he had lost and the husband he had destroyed. Kazakhstan was the final, desperate exit strategy—not to hide a secret, but to give a ghost a chance to finally rest.
Hamza slowly tilted his head, his glazed eyes moving away from the sheets. For a fleeting, fragile second, his gaze brushed against Sanyal face. He didn't say a word. He didn't agree, and he didn't cry. He just turned his eyes back toward the right side of his bed, looking at the empty pocket of air where Uzair always sat, as if silently asking his husband if they should finally pack their wet clothes from the rooftop and leave.
KAZAKHSTAN
The snow in Ridder didn't fall like the rain in lyari or Delhi. It fell in dead silence, burying the small, high-walled dacha under a heavy, pristine blanket of white. There were no sirens here. No humid heat, no crowded alleys, and no smell of old stone. Just the endless, freezing quiet of eastern Kazakhstan.
Inside the dacha, the air was warm, heated by a iron stove that crackled softly in the corner. Hamza sat in a plush armchair by the frosted triple-pane window, wrapped in a thick wool blanket. His hair was neatly brushed back,
Dr. Elena Petrova sat across from him. She wasn't wearing a sterile white lab coat, nor did she hold a clip-board or a syringe like the medical officers in Delhi. She held a warm mug of tea between her hands, her sharp, weathered eyes observing him with a calm patience.
For the first two weeks, she didn't try to force reality on him. She didn't ask about R&AW, she didn't mention Lyari, and she didn't try to administer the heavy chemical sedatives that Sanyal had sent in his file. She knew that trying to shatter a wall built out of that much grief would only kill the patient.
On the fifteenth morning, as the gray winter light filtered through the glass, Dr. Petrova took a slow sip of her tea, looked at Hamza guarded profile, and spoke in a quiet, entirely unbothered tone.
"How are your babies doing, Hamza? Are they good today?"
The silence in the room fractured instantly.
Hamza’s entire posture locked. His unblinking eyes, which had spent a fortnight staring fixedly at the falling snow, slowly drifted over to her. For the first time in over two years, someone wasn't telling him he was sick. Someone wasn't calling his life a delusion or telling him his children were a ghost. Someone had acknowledged them.
His lips parted, trembling violently as his chest took in a breath. The dam didn't just crack—it shattered entirely. The words came rushing out of him
"They—they are good, Doctor, they are very good today," Hamza stammered, "They are sleeping right now, In lyari, it is never this cold. I was so worried their chest would catch a chill, but Uzair... Uzair told me to keep them warm."
He leaned forward, the wool blanket slipping from his shoulders, his words tumbling over one another in a frantic, breathless torrent.
"The girl... she looks just like him, Doctor. She has his eyes, those big eyes that look right through you. But she is quiet. She doesn't cry much. The boy... oh, the boy is so stubborn! He runs around the bed all night. He doesn't want to sleep. I tell him, 'Look, your Abbu is going to come home from the docks soon, you must close your eyes,' but he just laughs at me. He has that same laugh... Rehman Bhai used to say all the Baloch boys have that stubborn blood."
Tears began to track non-stop down his cheeks, but for the first time, they weren't just tears of terror. They were mixed with a joy. He was completely uncaged, his hands moving through the air, gesturing wildly as he tried to show her the size of the tiny cheeks he had kissed in the dark.
"I made them clothes, you know? I told Sanyal sir I needed white cotton because the hospital blue is too rough for their skin. Their skin is so soft, Doctor. If you touch them too hard, they will bruise. Every night, I have to sing to them because the lightning in Delhi used to scare them so much. But here... here the snow is quiet. They like the snow. They look out the window with me and they watch the white flakes fall..."
He choked on a sob,
"They are real, Doctor. Please tell them they are real. Sanyal sir thinks I am crazy, Bansal thinks I am gone... but they don't know. They didn't feel them. They don't know that Uzair comes every night to help me put them to sleep. He sits right there... he holds my hand when my stomach hurts. Please... you won't take them away from me, right? You won't give me the medicine that makes them disappear?"
Dr. Petrova didn't move. She didn't flinch or look away from his face. She just set her mug down, keeping her eyes anchored to his, allowing the hamza breathe out the beautiful, tragic wreckage of his heart.
Dr. Petrova set her mug down on the table , She didn't call for a nurse. She didn't look down at a medical file. She just leaned forward, resting her forearms on her knees, keeping her calm, eyes completely locked onto Hamzatear-streaked face.
The silence returned to the dacha, but it was no longer the suffocating silence of a prison. It was a space she had deliberately opened up just for him.
"No, Hamza," she said, "I am not going to take them away from you. And I am not going to give you any medicine that forces you to forget."
Hamza’s breath hitched. He stayed frozen in the chair, "You have been carrying a very heavy weight in absolute silence," Dr. Petrova continued softly, "In India, they looked at your charts, they looked at your vitals, and they looked at you as an operative who broke. But I am not an analyst, Hamza. I am your doctor. If you tell me your babies are here, then we will talk about your babies."
A gasp tore out of Hamza throat. He let his head fall forward into his hands, his hair veiling his face as he began to weep. But these weren't the choked, silent tears of the Delhi ICU. This was a releasing of a soul that had been locked in ice.
"They... they think I am dead inside, Sanyal sir looks at me like... like I am a ghost he accidentally made. But I am not a ghost, Doctor. I feel everything. I feel the cold, I feel the guilt... I feel how much Uzair hated me when they took him away."
He slowly lifted his face, "Do you know what it is like?" he whispered, his hands dropping back to the wool blanket, his fingers twisting the fabric. "To look at the person who loves you more than life itself, and know that every sweet word you ever said to him was a lie written on an agency notepad? I killed Rehman Bhai. I broke Bhabhi's heart. And my babies... my babies paid the price for my sins. Their blood was on my hands, Doctor. Literally on my hands."
Dr. Petrova didn't try to offer empty platitudes. She didn't tell him it wasn't his fault, because she knew a deep-cover operative would see right through the lie. Instead, she leaned back,
"The guilt you feel is real, Hamza. The love you had for your husband is real," she said quietly, pointing a finger toward the frost-covered window. "And the space you have made in your mind for your children is the only way your heart knew how to keep itself from stopping. It is not madness. It is survival."
She stood up, walking over to the iron stove, and used a small steel poker to shift the burning wood inside. The amber glow flickered across the log walls of the dacha, casting long, warm shadows into the room.
"In Delhi, they wanted to cure you by wiping the slate clean," she said, turning back to look at him. "They wanted Jaskirat to come back, or Hamza to disappear. But you cannot bury the past under concrete. Here in Kazakhstan, the winter is long. We have nothing but time. If you want to tell me how Uzair used to look at you, I will listen. If you want to tell me what names you want for the twins, I will listen. But you must promise me one thing."
Hamza looked up, his lips parted, "What... what promise?"
"You must eat," Dr. Petrova said firmly, a small smile touching the corners of her mouth. "Real food. Not the tubes, not the chemical bags. If you want to protect the memory of those children, if you want to keep talking to your husband in the quiet of the night, your body must stay alive to do it. You cannot take care of them if you are starving yourself to death."
Hamza looked down at his lap. For the first time in a year, the nausea in his throat didn't rise at the mention of food. He looked to his right—to the empty pocket of space beside his armchair where the amber light from the stove fell perfectly warmth. In his mind, Uzair was standing there, his arms crossed over his chest, his eyes looking down at him with that quiet nod he used to give when the day was done.
Slowly, with a hesitation, Hamza looked back at the doctor and gave a tiny nod of his head.
"Okay," he whispered "I will try."
The days in the Kazakhstan dacha began to settle into a new, quiet rhythm. For the first time since the Lyari, Dr. Petrova kept her word. She didn't force pills down his throat that made the room spin, and she didn't bring in analysts to dissect his memories.
Instead, she brought him a bowl of simple, warm broth later that afternoon.
Hamza sat by the window, the bowl resting on his lap. His hands still shook slightly as he picked up the spoon, his eyes automatically darting to the empty space to his right. In his mind, Uzair was watching him, sitting on the low wooden stool near the hearth,
"He... he used to force me to eat," Hamza whispered suddenly, He looked up at Dr. Petrova, who was knitting quietly on the sofa across from him. "In lyari, when the heat was too much and I would lose my appetite, Uzair would bring fruit from the market. Mangoes. He would peel them with his pocketknife and hold the pieces to my mouth until I swallowed. He used to say, 'If you get thin, Hamza, people will think the Baloch house doesn't know how to feed its own.'"
Dr. Petrova didn't stop her needles. She just nodded, "He cared for you deeply."
"He loved me like breathing," Hamza said, he managed to swallow a spoonful of the warm broth. "And every single night, while he slept with his arm across my chest, I was a snake in his bed, Doctor. When they raided the house, the look he might have for me i didn't see it but i can feel it ... it wasn't anger. It was just... he looked like he had forgotten how to breathe."
He stared down into the broth, his tears splashing into the liquid.
"But when I was bleeding in that hospital in Delhi," Hamza continued, "when the doctors were screaming and everything was turning red... I felt him. I know it was a hallucination, but I felt his hand on my forehead. He didn't let me go into the dark alone. That is why I can't let him go now. If I stop thinking about him, if I stop talking to him, I stop talking to him, he will be completely alone in that black site. They will erase him."
"Then do not let him go," Dr. Petrova said softly, setting her knitting down. She walked over and gently adjusted the wool blanket around his shoulders. "But remember, Hamza—Uzair loved a man who was alive, not a shadow. To keep his memory clean, you must keep yourself whole."
Hamza looked out at the endless white landscape of Ridder. The snow was still falling, burying the world under a clean, unblemished sheet. For the first time in two years, the crushing weight in his chest felt a fraction lighter. He wasn't cured, and the ghosts hadn't left him—but here, in the freezing silence of Kazakhstan, he was finally allowed to grieve.
The anesthesia of the past began to wear thin, the heavy, rhythmic thuds of the Delhi ICU monitors slowing down, fading out until they morphed back into the quiet, steady ticking of the kitchen clock in Ridder.
But before the gray Kazakh afternoon could completely reclaim him, Hamza’s subconscious held onto one final image—the precise hinge where his ghosts had transformed into a reason to breathe.
In the twilight of his memory, he was back in that specific, flickering corner near the triage desk three years ago. He felt the phantom weight of the manila folder pressed against his bruised ribs, the cold glass of the hospital exit doors just inches away. He remembered the exact moment his boots had frozen on the floors at the sound of that fractured, gasping wail.
It was Ishmir.
A tiny, blue-tinted bundle lying bare on the unfeeling steel counter. No blanket, no name, abandoned by a world that had already stripped Hamza of his own bloodline. His mind vividly replayed the sheer, terrifying rush of adrenaline that had overtaken his ruined body—the way he had lunged backward, scooping that fragile, freezing life against his chest, refusing to let the Kazakh chill claim this innocent soul.
“Main isko marne nahi doonga, Uzair. Main isko bacha loonga.”
That desperate, tear-stained promise made to an empty room had been the anchor. Every midnight fever, every shaky, melodic lullaby hummed into the boy’s soft hair during his first year of life had been a stitch repairing the firewall in Hamza's brain. Ishmir hadn't just grown under his care; that tiny boy had actively dragged a nameless, shattered ghost out of the graveyard of his past.
FLASHBACK END
A violent, shuddering breath tore out of Hamza’s throat as his eyes flew open.
The suffocating heat of the Delhi safehouse and the blood-soaked memories of Lyari vanished instantly, dissolved by the biting reality of the room. The heavy sedative was still running like liquid lead through his veins, making his limbs feel disconnected, but the illusion was gone.
He was lying on the small sofa in the corner of his living room, his knees still pulled tightly against his chest in a protective fetal position. His fingers were clawed into the wool of his own sweater, trembling violently against his flat, scarred abdomen.
The house was deathly quiet.
Hamza blinked rapidly, trying to clear the dazed, chemical fog from his vision. Through the frost-rimed windows, the pale light of the afternoon was beginning to recede, casting long, stark shadows across the floorboards. The blue flame of the gas stove had long been turned off. The plates of mutton stew he had slammed down in a fit of frantic rage were gone, the table cleared with a clinical, unsettling precision.
Slowly, Hamza pushed himself up into a sitting position, his head swimming as his hand instinctively went to his neck, checking for the scent of old tobacco and rain that wasn't there.
He looked toward the dining table.
Ajay Sanyal was still sitting there. The Director hadn't moved an inch, his posture as rigid and straight-backed as a magistrate presiding over an empty court. The old wooden chessboard sat between them, the black and white pieces frozen in the middle of their stalemated war. Sanyal’s fingers were resting lightly against the edge of his leather-bound notebook, his eyes tracking Hamza every micro-movement as the boy woke up.
“Ishmir… Ishmir… Ishmir ko laane ka time ho gaya,” Hamza stammered,
He scrambled to get his feet under him, his hands sliding uselessly against the fabric of the sofa as his vision tilted violently. The chemical haze of the sedative combined with the raging heat in his skin made the room spin on its axis. He looked up at the Director, “Main so gaya tha… Sir, aapne jagaya kyun nahi? Mujhe jana tha. School …”
“Are, Hamza, so jaao,” Ajay Sanyal cut in quickly, “Uzair gaya hai usse laane. Aur tumhara bukhar bohot tez hai, maine abhi check kiya—”
Sanyal’s words hadn't even finished when the front door clicked open,
The door swung open, letting in a sharp, howling gust of freezing Kazakh air along with a flurry of white snow. Framed in the doorway stood Uzair Baloch, his shoulders dusted with white, Tucked securely in his arms, bundled up so tightly in a thick woolen parka and a red scarf that only his bright eyes were visible, was Ishmir.
The moment Uzair set him down on the rug, Ishmir didn't even wait for his boots to be unlaced. He kicked them off at the threshold and ran straight into the living room.
“Baba!” the boy squealed, throwing his small arms around Hamza’s neck as Hamza sank back onto his knees to catch him.
But the moment Ishmir’s cold, wind-chapped cheek pressed against Hamza’s neck, the little boy pulled back slightly, his small brow furrowing in confusion. He patted Hamza’s face with his tiny, gloved hands. “Baba… why are you warm?”
Hearing those words, Uzair entire demeanor shifted. The detached look he had worn all morning vanished. He hurriedly walked across the room, his boots thudding against the floorboards, and knelt directly in front of them. he reached out and placed his palm flat against Hamza forehead.
The heat radiating off Hamza’s skin was alarming—a burning fever that had completely taken over his fragile system.
“Tumhara dimaag kharab hai?” Uzair growled, as he looked at the flush on Hamza cheeks.
Before Hamza could even mutter a protest or push him away, Uzair slid one arm beneath his knees and the other behind his back. With a single motion, he hoisted Hamza completely off the sofa and into his arms.
Hamza gasped, his hands instinctively clutching at Uzair coat for balance as his head dropped weakly against Uzair shoulder. He was too exhausted, too burning hot to fight the embrace that had once been his entire world. Uzair turned, ignoring the rest of the room entirely, and carried him back toward the warmth of the bedroom.
Behind them, sitting quietly at the edge of the chessboard, Ajay Sanyal watched the entire sequence unfold.
As the bedroom door clicked shut behind the two men, a slow smile spread across the Director's face. He picked up his white knight, turning the piece over in his fingers with a look of quiet satisfaction.....
( Okay, I know some people might feel the writing is too dramatic. Yes, I added a little drama, but this part isn't an exaggeration.
Hallucinations are a very real and serious struggle for many people. What I described may not even be 20% of what some of them truly experience. Those who live with it understand just how overwhelming and frightening it can become.
Just a note —enjoy the chapter).
