Besides graves and cardboard boxes, sewage pipes are another shelter for the underprivileged in Isfahan.

HRANA News Agency – A number of underprivileged and addicted people on the outskirts of Isfahan city are forced to spend their days and nights inside sewage pipes due to lack of a place to live. Among these people, who are referred to as sleeping pipes, are unemployed citizens from provinces such as Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari, Kermanshah and the southern provinces of the country, as well as citizens of neighboring countries. There are no exact statistics on the number of sleeping pipes, but it is said that they are among the one million marginalized citizens of the country. The following report describes the lives of some of these citizens.

According to HRANA News Agency, citing Shargh newspaper, a number of underprivileged and addicted people on the outskirts of Isfahan are forced to spend their days and nights inside sewage pipes due to lack of a place to live.

According to this report, among these people are unemployed citizens from low-income provinces such as Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari, Kermanshah, and the southern provinces of the country, as well as citizens of neighboring countries.

In the following report, Sharq Newspaper describes the lives of a number of these people:

"When you stand in the middle of the airport highway, you can see thatched houses from afar that seem endless. The ends of these houses reach the deserts of dirt whose sunsets have a different color. Sand dunes and concrete pipes are stuck together, outside the boundaries, clinging to the veins of the soil; we stand firm on the clay soil and climb up. Gray pipe shacks are visible from afar; people are crouching next to the walls of the pipes, the pipes are right on the edge of the desert, on the northernmost point of Isfahan, like in a Hollywood apocalyptic movie.

No matter how far you go, it's nothing but a desert with cement pipes separating it from its two halves so that people with addictions can't be easily seen. The days here are sad, the good days of the house-to-house duo. Memories don't leave them for a moment; when they served life to the fullest in their homes, and now, in the plundering of these ruins, they have forgotten their love.

Here, the eyes of the pipe sleepers lead to the diameter of the cement pipes; a ceiling that has another meaning for Reza and has now become a ceiling for him. He is crumpled up in the pipe in which he has hidden his entire being. Several sacks of dirt and a faded jacket for cold days, hanging plastic bags, each of which is pregnant with his own little things; from sore eyes to glasses, lighters and candy.

This is the home of Reza and his ilk. The distraught inhabitants of doorless, windowless, pillarless houses that are the width of a skinny man's shoulders. Many of them, due to misfortune or bankruptcy or some other false reason, have been patched into these cement pipes, their houses stuck in tunnels; where death bows every day before the cloudless sky and the alleys are filled with the smell of stagnation.

Downtown has its own world. One of those uniform and simple worlds, sometimes with its own complexities. Sloping shutters, dirty juice shops and sandwich shops, a lonely butcher shop with a whistle and a blind eye, and grocery stores that are themselves a whole lot of stories amidst the pains that their people have become accustomed to. Pains here are different, like a lonely chair that you have crumpled up, but still remains upright.

Why are you walking so far? There is no mention of those long, wide, and even streets, nor of the beauties of the fresh, new trees and newly built houses. The air on the outskirts is cold and icy. It's as if you have a fever. It's as if you need to put a bag of ice on your body to evaporate all the moaning and let it go. As you go further down, where the cardboard sleepers have lain on the ruins, you see sleeping graves that smell of death. Women have been locked up and plundered, and they have become one with the hot bodies of the earth that have bound their bodies like burnt clay.

From up here, by the entrance gate, it's as if you've stepped into nowhere; an endless, empty alley; scary and terrifying, its setting sun turning it blue. A confused tangle of people hiding in holes, in cement pipes, clinging to the soil, crumpled and overheated. The heat of the air seems to pierce your skin and prickle your entire body. There's no way to the hangouts that have taken the name of home, but the heat kicks you in the face every time, making Reza's chatter unbearable.

A little further away, a hangover runs through Reza's skin and bones, and he stares at the sky with his back to the pipes. In the midst of his chatter, he lights the atomic lighter with difficulty and holds it under a sheet of paper whose tar has turned black; the flame spreads and a black sap comes to life on the sheet, and Reza inhales its smoke.

Here, a pipe with a few blankets and plastic sheets hanging from it is a shelter for Reza and the others on hot and cold days. Sediqeh is also one of the pipe sleepers in this neighborhood; when she came here, she named her Shaghayegh. It takes a while to see between the black teeth of one of them, the image of a beautiful woman in her 20s. Before the ruins plundered her face, Sediqeh was there with a smile and piercing black eyes. It takes half an hour for her frozen vein to accept the sharp tip of the syringe, the thin stream of her vein swallows all the heroin, and she leans against the heat of the cement pipe at the foot of the highway, which is not very visible from a distance.

He sits on a pile of old clothes that fill a few inches of the bottom of the pipe. The contents of the pipe start with all kinds of old clothes, dusty bottles, and end up with garbage that has taken on a foul smell in this makeshift room. Forty pieces of different types of cloth carpet the floor of Reza's small house and the others. Thick smoke rises into the air from the old houses. The inhabitants of the pipes look at us wearily.

The alleys are often bottomless, and women and children are the main actors in the alley scene. The smell of poverty seeps out even from tiny cracks in the walls and doors of houses, mixing with the outside air and filling one's nose.

Gray houses with domed roofs

It's two o'clock in the afternoon in June, and the air is thick with heat, and the pipes seem to be blistering. The weather is too cruel to tolerate a little bit of stuffy air with those plastic patches. The homeowners feel like they've been robbed.

Masoumeh says, “You see, wherever we are, we are one. Wherever we are, we are close to each other. We have each other. We are used to each other. We share the same room. We are in the same room. This is all of Mas’s life.” She is right; the common possessions they all have are a few quilts, tattered clothes, and burnt mattresses that are tucked away in gray houses with domed roofs.

The conversation begins; I ask, do you live here?! A man who looks like he's in his 60s, as he lies crumpled in the tube, shakes his head and says: "Why? We live here; me and "this""; he says "this" to the boy next to him. Iman jumps in the middle of his speech, when he raises his head, the redness of his eyes is striking, his eyes are sunken. As his blue lips move, incomprehensible words fly out of his mouth, which ends with the words that we're just smoking here and then going to our own homes.

The girl next to her is a girl who speaks more logically. She has been flowering for two years and still hasn't done as much as the others... In short, she has a world to say; so much so that only the insults and curses of the girl next to her shut her mouth. Her name is "Nazanin." I ask about her addiction; her gaze remains fixed on the ground; the looks bother her; one of the practical ones throws something and she prefers to remain silent.

Asghar is also one of the residents of the tubes. Squatting by the dim fire, he bends and straightens like an old tortoise. Asghar's daily nap is accompanied by whimpers: "You don't know. It feels like needles are falling from the air, my face is burning, by God. The soles of my feet are like an oven from the heat."

Half of the cigarette, in the crook of his finger without puffing, turns to ash, and each time his hand trembles, he slips to the floor and dies. Nothing happens before he painstakingly fills the syringe with heroin juice. He taps his ankle to expose the abandoned vein. The dried tissue is injured several times until he finally finds a healthy gray vein.

He sighs from the back of his throat and swallows life into his rotten arteries; then, as if he had been nailed to a stake, he is released onto the ground, feverish with heat. It is neither the first nor the last time that a hangover flashes in his eyes again, and he bids farewell to moments of consciousness and becomes mobile like a dead man.

Asghar is now one of half a million people living on the outskirts of the city who are neither slum dwellers nor cardboard sleepers; he goes by the name of the pipe sleeper. There is no official and acceptable statistic on the number of pipe sleepers. They are immigrants who have either come from the surrounding areas and villages or have been drawn here from neighboring countries in search of a better life. Among these people are unemployed citizens from low-income provinces such as Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari, Kermanshah, and the southern provinces of the country, as well as citizens of neighboring countries.

The outcasts, whose population is not very large due to the unbalanced distribution of economic resources, according to unofficial statistics, are counted among the half million marginalized people who have been dissolved in the unbalanced distribution of resources and have now reached a state of slumber.

Asghar, as he lies down, raises his hand and says: "This is the end of the world." Then his eyes fix on the scarred sky that is turning to darkness. It is twilight and the population of sleepwalkers is no longer a handful. The inhabitants of the houses are returning, to their place of sleep until tomorrow a new day begins for the monotonous gray houses."

Source: HRANA