There are seventy seven pipes under the town called Jairaz. Of these, only fifty two can be accessed- the rest have caved in or been blocked. Not a lot of people live here anymore post the ‘32 bomb explosion, and now, almost four years later, most of these streets are desolate, deserted and depressing. Those who didn’t die in the blast live in dark alleys, or the blown apart rooms, only coming out in search of food, and sometimes family.
The fifty two pipes still standing have a center point called the Circle. It’s far from an original name, but it’s the one given by the forty year old lady, Nina and her husband, Kaz, who live there.
The Circle has a gutter cap tight in the middle of it, and beyond that a ladder that descends to the ground. Around the first steps of the ladder the couple have placed a mattress, a steel box filled with odds and ends, and a broken wooden crate that could be considered their cupboard. In the shadowy corner is a small metal box that is Nina’s alone and Kaz stays well away from it.
There were seventy seven pipes of which fifty two could be used and in these fifty two pipes through which Kaz walked every day, there were twenty three pot holes. These potholes were deep and the drop was high, and the one time Nina had peered inside, she could see nothing but darkness, hear nothing but her own breathing, and smell nothing but her own fear.
“Ye Dozakh[1] ka naya rasta hoga.”[2] Kaz used to say.
“Dozakh itni asani se nahin milti.”[3] Nina would reply.
Once, holding tightly to Kaz’s arm, Nina had peered inside and after staring into nothing for a few minutes, had stepped back and had instead taken off one of her shoes to drop into the hole. It couldn’t be Dozakh, because as far as Nina knew, Dozakh wasn’t a straight, barely four foot diameter drop, twenty feet below the sewage pipes of Jairaz, and the sound the shoe made when it hit the ground confirmed that the landing was closer than either of them thought. On the way back Nina stepped closer to Kaz, and held him more tightly, hand stretched out in the dark as she led them back to the Circle.
That was four years ago. Kaz went above every day now, searching for food and news and occasionally for the wildflower he would pick for Nina. He would sing a song to cross the potholes, waiting for the echoes to tell him where to step, his voice off tune and terrible, but serving the purpose he needed it to.
Potholes are on the ground
Potholes are kind of round
If you fall in, you’re a nutter
Man you just fell from the gutter.
Nina was hesitant to let him go, forcing him to unravel a ball of yarn along the way, one end of it attached to the pillars of their home, so that if he ever got lost Nina would find him again.
The first time Kaz tripped, he didn’t tell Nina. He stumbled to the edge of the sixteenth pothole and it was only a desperately flung hand that caught on the uneven falls of the pipe that prevented him from falling down into the hole. He didn’t tell Nina but the cuts on his hands, the stutter that accompanied the lie, and his inability to come up with a believable story had Nina pursing her lips and looking away.
Nina started walking him down the pipes. She could navigate the tunnels with or without the song, relying on senses unbeknownst to him to guide both of them, and would wait for him under the same gutter cap to take him back.
Some days he returned early and entered the tunnel with no Nina in sight and would depend on himself, and his trusty song to get him back to her.
The second time it happened, he got away with a broken ankle. He dragged himself back to the Circle, not meeting Nina’s eyes and refusing to discuss moving back to the surface.
Two days later Nina told him she wanted children, or a pet, or even adults- just something that made them three instead of two, something that made the Circle a little brighter even when Kaz wasn’t with her.
Kaz wasn’t against it, despite the trepidation with which she brought the subject up.
“Let’s try for kids again,” he said, almost instantly.
“No, it’s too late, I don’t think I can.”
“Is it really?”
“Haan. And it’s too dangerous down here.” Waddling in the dark through the pipes for nine months wasn’t something Nina was eager to try, even if she could navigate them expertly herself.
“We could move back up until he’s born.” Kaz’s insistence wasn’t unnatural or surprising. Back in the day he had been the friendly neighborhood uncle who would play cricket in the galli, take all the boys for namaz on Friday and buy them makai afterwards- he’d always loved kids, but he had never pressured her when she had difficulty conceiving. His offer to go back up, however, surprised Nina. With the sporadic blasts still happening and the mutations they’d seen in the elders living up there, he rarely let her go outside- it was too dangerous.
“This keechar is better than the kanjars up there.”
Kaz had no answer for this, but he smiled and pulled her in a little closer.
There were enough children orphaned in the ‘32 bomb blast that when Kaz brought in a nine year old boy, with big bambi eyes, greasy brown hair and a dirty face, Nina took him in without hesitation. His name was Whist and he didn’t remember his parents. He had spent the last few years flitting from one alleyway to another, and the pipe wasn’t that much different for him.
While Nina and Whist became inseparable within a few days, Kaz and him exchanged little more than a few dozen words. Whist spent his mornings with Nina, sometimes reading the odd books the couple had collected over the years, sometimes untangling the yarn she used to knit with, sometimes just scratching things into the walls of the Circle. Often Nina would fill the hours telling him stories of the time when she lived on the surface, most of which revolved around Kaz. For all she talked about her partner, Kaz was rarely around in his waking hours, and Whist mostly ever heard the echoes of his voice through the haze of sleep. Often the child would slip away in the afternoon, exploring the pipes on his own, carefully singing the song that Kaz had taught him, although Whist had surprisingly learnt to navigate the labyrinth with the grace Nina herself possessed. His nights came early as Nina tucked him in before even the faint traces of sunlight had faded through the gutter seal, and more often than not, before Kaz had come back.
So Kaz and Whist continued to be awkward strangers who couldn’t get close despite their willingness to. Thus, when three months after his addition Whist disappeared along with one of Nina’s balls of yarn, Kaz felt little more than empty shock, and the shallow levels of grief you’d expect to feel losing someone who was barely a shadow for you. He was more concerned for Nina. She refused to speak for days after, not moving from the little spot in the corner where Whist had carved into the wall, curled in a corner rocking back and forth. Kaz could do nothing but hold her when she was in this state, constantly repeating that Whist must have gone to look for his other family, and yes of course he loved you, and you know, he probably took the yarn to remember you.
Weeks passed and a new normal began where Whist was neither mentioned, nor was there any indication that he had ever ghosted the walls of the Circle. That is, until Nina started fidgeting every time Kaz went into the tunnels, and stayed up till he came back, before finally cornering him one day.
“I want someone here with me. A kid, a pet, an adult. Anyone.”
“After W- after all that?”
Nina had no answer, but that was answer enough for Kaz and two days later, he brought back a child slightly older than Whist in tow. Kuka was twelve, and surly, and just like Whist and the thousands of kids living in Jairaz- homeless, friendless and family-less. He took longer to settle in, but soon he had the same camaraderie with Nina, and the same distance with Kaz that Whist had shared.
Seven weeks later, Kaz saw the sleeping boy in the morning as he went off for his daily work, and came back to a silent, grief stricken Nina, looking for a pair of gloves and a little boy who had gone off to play and never come back.
Kaz could do little to console Nina. Her silence and grief were less stagnant this time, but she held him tighter, and within a few days, turned to him with the same request.
Yag, Minchi, and Pura came and went. All of them disappeared from the Circle sooner than the first and the list kept growing. With each missing child, something small and insignificant disappeared from their tiny abode as well. When Hari, Jaya, Unni, Hyun, Kia and Zara all decided to leave as well, Kaz stopped leaving Nina alone in the Circle, worried that her grief would bury her whole. Days and nights passed with the two just holding each other, the question not passing Nina’s lips as long as Kaz stayed with her but there was only so long he could make their rations last.
And so, three days later, Kaz knew he had to leave again. And so, three days later Nina asked him the same question, again. The hesitation in his eyes showed his disagreement, but Nina’s insistence wore him down.
The next addition wasn’t a boy, or a girl or even a woman or a man. It was a two foot tall, three feet long dog. The dog’s breed was unidentifiable. He was pitiful with all his ribs poking out, and his dirty, mangled, mud-spattered fur. Kaz watched silently as the dog trotted over to Nina, and within a few minutes, was content on letting her clean him. He was still standing there a few minutes later when she patted his head and called him Goli.
Kaz held her silently after Goli disappeared 11 days later.
Goli’s disappearance wouldn’t have been surprising if he had been allowed to trot around in the maze of pipes. For most of the day, he was tied securely to a ledge in the Circle, his leash only long enough for him to pad around within the Circle, far away from all the potholes, released only when Nina herself took him for a stroll in the pipes, careful to make sure he didn’t slip in. The night of Goli’s disappearance, after Kaz had rocked her to sleep, he followed the dog’s leash and spent the night examining the unmarred collar.
Nina started walking Kaz into the pipes every morning. They’d cross the first ten potholes; Nina sure-footed and Kaz slipping as he usually did, her grip tight on his arm as she pulled him onto the right path every couple of seconds. She would exhale only after they’d made it past the first ten potholes, stayed with him as he repeated the sequence to her carefully, then watched him cross the rest of the pipes as far as she could in the crawling darkness. They continued this for almost 19 days.
Until, despite her careful teachings, Kaz stumbled. He’d hidden a scratch from her before, had almost succeeded in hiding his broken ankle, but the dislocated shoulder, and the astonishingly elongated arm he got because of that, was much harder to conceal.
That evening he crouched between the potholes and rummaged through the things he was carrying. He forced a piece of wood between his teeth, biting down his screams as he pushed his shoulder back into place. He only spent a few minutes bucked over in pain before massaging it with damp towels and gingerly navigating his arm back into his kurta. When he returned home, Nina swept her gaze over him once before she squeezed his hand and looked at him with the same yearning in her eyes. He balked a little at the edges of madness and desperation seeping into her face before cradling her cheek with his uninjured hand.
“I don’t want to be alone here.”
Kaz was tempted to take her back up to the surface, but he couldn’t. The heartbreak she felt when the children left her was one type of pain, but living again in the state of war that still sporadically raged up there- he couldn’t. The bombs were still dropping and the chemicals in the air were still a far greater danger than anything in the pipes. So he nodded tightly and it continued.
Cats refused to enter the damp caverns of the pipes, so it was another dog that he brought in. And another, and anotherandanotherandanother. Nine new dogs eventually came and, like clockwork, disappeared. Kaz and Nina stopped naming them and the pattern continued; Nina waking every morning to watch Kaz hobble off with a pinched face, Nina spending her days with the dog, and the dog being put to sleep before Kaz came back in the evening. The pattern was etched into the walls of the Circle by now, so deeply that even Kaz knew that within three or four days, he’d have to venture out in search again.
The next one Kaz brought back to the Circle was held tighter in Nina’s arms. She called him Chuza and tied his leash to her arm even when she slept.
Nina walked him only past the first pothole now. He still carried the extra ball of yarn, and still brought it back in the evening. But she no longer crossed the twenty three pot holes as she did before, and she no longer walked him past the first ten either. After crossing the first pot hole with him, she stopped and watched him go on.
Kaz had been scrounging the streets for rations for two hours when he heard the unmistakable sound of an aircraft. With reflexes he had honed in the past three years, he scurried towards the first gutter hole he could find, and dropped down.
Within a few minutes of feeling about in the dark, he deduced that he was between the seventeenth and eighteenth pothole, just a half hour journey from his Circle. He knelt on the ground, looking around the yarn he had dropped in the morning, picking it up and started making his way back.
His song didn’t work as well as he had originally thought it would, but he sang it anyway. It was a new song Nina had taught him and the rhythm was still unfamiliar to him.
Started with seventy three
Left with fifty two
12 and 11 holes in here
But I’ll come back to you.
Yarn that never ends
Two that’s never three
You wanted someone to stay with you
But you still only have me
Maybe it was the irony of things, or maybe it was just fate playing her song, because the note that accompanied his ‘me’ went higher than it usually did. Seven feet away from the Circle, he lost his footing and stumbled. For a moment, he was suspended over the very first pothole, and then he fell.
The song was clung in the air around him, the melody drifting like the melancholic tune from a wind-up music box opened after a long time. Time caught up with him and he yelled as his body hit the ground, but his voice was drowned out by the sharp cracking of ribs. His body lay there, twisted in the 4 feet diameter space. His head hurt, he couldn’t speak, couldn’t move and could barely breathe. His chest was burning, and he coughed lightly, unable to hold it back, tasting the blood it brought up. Time was ticking and he didn’t have much of it left.
He stayed there for a few minutes, maybe a few hours, slipping in and out of consciousness, unable to scream for help.
Sound traveled weirdly here, he realised, in a moment of lucidity. The shoe Nina had thrown in so long ago had barely been heard by them, but he could hear her loud and clear as she neared the pothole. She was talking to Chuza, his cheerful barks as prominent as her lilting voice.
Kaz tried to yell out, wanting her to hear him even if she couldn’t save him, but the blood gurgled in his throat and nothing came out.
Thunk
Was it raining in the potholes? He blinked as he felt around with his good hand. It was a knitting needle that had landed on his twisted ankle. Belatedly, he realized it was poking into his skin, but the numbness in his body barely allowed him to register the spike of pain.
Thud. Ouch. He felt that.
It was someone’s shoe that hit him next, he was sure.
He felt rather than heard the soft scarf that fell after it.
“I don’t know if the scarf will be enough to keep you warm Chuza, I’m sorry if you won’t be as comfortable as the rest down there.”
She was still talking to Chuza, Kaz chuckled through the froth of blood. It was nice that she would have someone to talk to when he inevitably choked on his own blood and died.
“You’re the last pothole I need to fill. It’s small enough so if you fall, you’ll cushion the fall if Kaz ever does.”
Through the haze of pain and hysteria, Kaz wished he could muster up the feeling of disgust. As his brain sluggishly understood the disappearances of all their occupants, he tried to feel terror and hate for the woman he loved, but for all his efforts, he failed.
“I loved them. And I love you too. But I love Kaz most.”
Seconds later, Chuza’s body dropped into the pothole. His head, grotesque and twisted as it hit the wall, stared mournfully at Kaz. And all Kaz could think was how he wished it had been Nina joining him in this circle below the Circle. ‘Maybe,’ he thought as he finally closed his eyes, ‘I’ll meet her again in the real Dozak this time.’
[1] Dozakh: Hell
[2] English Translation: “This must be a new road to hell.”
[3] English Translation: “Hell can’t be found this easily.”