Zoleikha Baloch is a Baloch writer based in Iran. She writes fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction centered on women’s lives, memory, and resilience in Balochistan. Her work has appeared in seven international literary journals, including Solarpunk Magazine, Sky Island Journal, Chestnut Review, and belladonna’s garden. Through her writing, she seeks to bring Baloch voices and stories into a wider literary conversation.
Insistence
Autumn arrived without announcement.
In Nikshahr, the Makran wind did not ask permission. It slipped through doorframes, settled beneath fingernails, gathered at the corners of mouths. Touba tasted it before she saw it—metal, clay, something older than both.
In Qasr-e-Qand, the date palms let go all at once.
Leaves dropped straight down, striking the yard flat. Under sandals, they cracked. No one bent to gather them.
One leaf dragged along the packed earth, its edges singed from weeks of sun. The wind lifted it once, twice—not enough to carry it away.
Touba picked it up.
Inside the house:
“Where is she?”
“Outside,” Golpari said, hands deep in indigo cloth.
“What is she doing?”
A pause.
“Nothing.”
Mirrors stitched into the fabric scattered light across the wall.
“Wash your hands,” Golpari said. “Ghafour is irritated.”
“Why?”
A thread snapped between her teeth.
“Men do not need reasons.”
At the basin, water ran warm from the pipes. Dust softened into mud beneath Touba’s fingers. The towel came away brown. She set the leaf beside the sink.
Her notebook lay beneath the mattress—once discovered already.
That afternoon, Ghafour had turned the pages slowly, stopping where her handwriting pressed hardest.
“Who will marry a girl,” he said,
“Who writes about her own house?”
He had not taken the notebook.
He had closed it.
Touba opened to a blank page. The leaf left a faint imprint.
“Mama.”
Golpari’s hands stilled.
“Did you ever want to leave?”
The needle resumed its small, controlled violence.
From the courtyard, a radio slipped in and out of signal. A child shouted, then quiet.
“Every woman leaves,” Golpari said. “Some never cross the gate.”
Touba wrote.
Not about leaves.
She wrote about Zeinab, promised before she understood what promise meant. Henna mixed too thick. Eucalyptus sharp in the throat. Women laughing too loudly. Zeinab holding her hands up for hours, waiting for the dark to settle.
She wrote about the first sign of womanhood—
and what followed:
sit differently
walk differently
lower your voice
do not be seen from the road
shrink.
I am told silence is protection,
she wrote.
Protection for whom.
A shadow filled the doorway.
“What are you doing?”
“Homework.”
“Let me see.”
The wind pressed against the roof. Tin shuddered.
He waited.
The page lay open between them.
From the courtyard, Golpari’s voice:
“She is studying.”
A long moment.
Then footsteps moving away.
Touba did not look up. The leaf shifted slightly on the paper. She pressed it flat and kept writing.
Outside, the call to prayer rose through the wind.
Inside, the mirrors scattered the last of the light.
The page held its mark.