By Ganjal Baloch
How do you spell this
when tears stay in the throat and travel down into bone,
and bone remembers, and bone aches.
The mind goes over and over in its own ruin
a reel of silence playing your own helplessness back to you.
No one answers.
And that helplessness
it settles a tent inside your lungs,
a permanent suffocation,
a choke with no hand to blame.
This helplessness is now nameless.
You don’t know where the day begins
or where it ends.
Just burials.
Just disappearances.
I had written those lines in my phone’s note app. I wanted to go on, but nothing was finding a place in my mind. So I put the phone aside and closed my eyes.
That’s when it all came
not sleep, not calm
but bodies.
Disappearances.
Baloch lives folding into numbers.
A body drops,
and it doesn’t even reach the news.
In Barkhan, in other corners where silence hides murder,
people are killed in staged encounters.
We don’t even know which name belongs to which corpse anymore.
In Awaran, they summon villagers to military camps
some never return. Only their bodies do.
Death squads move freely, like they own the night.
And I
with my fragile head and heavy hands
can do nothing.
Helpless again.
Better to open my eyes. I thought.
So I reached for my phone
something to hold.
And the date said 30 May.
A message blinked on my screen:
Surab❤️
Just that.
A city’s name.
And a heart.
Just before that message arrived,
I was slipping
into drowsiness, into weakness,
into a pain so heavy it made my bones ache.
Not from illness
but the ache of helplessness,
the ache of knowing your people are dying,
being hunted.
Especially in Awaran,
where the killings feel too close,
too real.
And then there’s Mahjabeen
a young girl taken, disappeared,
and it has made me sick down to my jaws.
My bones ache.
Even my blood aches.
That other night, I dreamed of my Gwando
my son,
my sarmachār,
who is now braving the mountains of Balochistan.
My heart, always aching for him,
ached more.
I woke and sent him a message,
even though I know he won’t reply.
He is offline,
somewhere out there
maybe one day he’ll return
with a new contact.
I miss him.
That made my heart heavier.
And what the enemy is doing now
cowardly things.
Targeting the families of those
who fight for our liberation.
They cannot reach the ones who resist,
so they reach their mothers, their brothers,
the ones with no arms,
no shield,
just love.
Bloody coward enemy.
And then
just then
that message.
Surab❤️
I knew what it meant.
Brave hearts had arrived.
And with them,
hope walked in too.
There is still life.
They are here
to remind us
we have not been abandoned in this cruelty.
They are here
to protect.
To face the coward enemy
that only knows how to harm the unarmed.
I saw a video.
And the sky of Surab was full of smoke.
But for the first time
this smoke did not choke us.
No
with every rising plume,
something inside me was being set free.
And trust me
just moments before that,
I had been writing a poem
about the helplessness that had taken shelter in my body.
It had made a home in my bones.
It was growing roots in my lungs.
But then
that message,
that video,
the news.
State buildings burning.
A Baloch sarmachār standing tall,
rifle in hand.
Our people around him
not mourning,
not running,
but cheering.
Celebrating.
Celebrating the courage,
the lives,
the presence
of those who have given everything
for us,
for this land,
for the dignity we have been stripped of
in this long, cruel colonization.
The people
they are never afraid.
They hate Pakistan,
and they love their sarmachār.
Then another video
a sarmachār fires at the gate of a bank,
and when the shutter opens,
whistles rise,
cheers erupt,
joy thunders through the street.
Oh, our people
if only for a fleeting moment
are celebrating this.
Not grief,
not loss,
but this now.
This flame.
This defiance.
And I
I should live it too.
I should stretch my feet.
I should make myself tea.
I should take a shower.
I should laugh at Bahot’s tweets.
Yes, I know.
After this,
with Surab under the control of BLA,
Pakistan will go mad
mad in its cowardice.
It will disappear more of us.
It will kill more.
But hasn’t it always?
Let this moment stay.
Let this movement stay.
Let it be with us.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of The Balochistan Post or any of its editors.