Dur
Bibi

I don't know your mother, Hani Dilwash. I saw her face on a screen, a flicker of horror in the endless scroll. A post, "Eight months pregnant." "Abducted." The words were clean, typed. My soul shattered like dropped glass.

I thought of you, Immediately. A tiny, forming ghost floating in a stolen dark. Are you kicking right now? Can you feel her fear like a second, bitter cord? Does her panic taste like metal in your amniotic sea? They have taken the sky from you. They have taken the sun. They have taken the soft murmur of preparation, the folding of cloth, the choosing of a name. They have replaced it with the slam of a vehicle door, the cold of a concrete cell, the silence of a question that no one will answer.

Let me tell you about the land they have stolen you into. Balochistan, your home, Balochistan is not a line on a map. It is a feeling, and an identity. It is the raw, dry wind that screams through the Bolan Pass, a wind that has carried the whispers of the disappeared for decades. It is the impossible turquoise of the sea at Pasni, a beauty so sharp it cuts you, knowing fishermen are barred from their own waters. It is the brutal, baking silence of the Sibbi, where the heat feels like a weight and survival is a quiet art. It is the defiant stones of Kalat, which remember the shape of sovereignty. This is your home. Every road is severed by checkposts. Every mountain pass echoes with the memory of gunfire. Every sunset over the Baloch Sea is witnessed by the mechanical eye of a drone. You are being born into a giant, beautiful, open-air prison.

I am writing from a place of fury so vast it has its own weather inside my chest. I am writing because I have seen what they do. I have seen the inheritance they try to force upon our daughters. I have seen Gulzadi.

Oh, pretty, Gulzadi. They took her. Then they took her and they again took her and threw her into a cage. They filed sixteen cases against her for the same single moment of courage. Sixteen yes baby, sixteen. Also, men from the Counter Terrorism Department bruised her, her letter she wrote from prison was her evidence of what she went through. They beat her because she is a courageous woman. They beat her because her voice is a knife they cannot dull. They left their hatred on her skin. She is the woman fighting for you. She is being broken, over and over, and every time, she puts her bones back together in the shape of a clear NO, a no to accepting state atrocities, a no to accepting what state wants her to accept.

This is the sisterhood you are entering. A sisterhood of scars.

Do you understand? Your mother has been taken, but she is not alone. She is held in the fury of Mahrang, who is sitting in a cell right now, her medical hands bruised, her spirit a contained wildfire. They think pain is a language we will learn. They are fools. Our women speak a deeper tongue.

Your mother is held in the ten-year-old grief of Sammi, a girl who traded toys for a photograph of her father and has been walking towards an answer ever since. She is held in the glacial eyes of Sabiha Baloch, oh Sabiha, our comrade.! Her father was abducted because of her brilliance, whose family is terrorized for her voice, who looks at the state and says, "My crime is speaking for humanity."

These are your mothers now, too. Their pain is your heirloom. Not a delicate jewellery, but a weight, a mantle, a shield forged in the hottest part of the fire.

They are leading with a fierceness that steals my breath. They are organizing while their brothers are in graves, in prisons and in the torture cells. They are speaking while their fathers are in danger. They are loving, fiercely, desperately, a land that grinds their bones to dust. They are loving you already, a child they have never met, because your existence is the future they are clawing out of the ruin.

When you are born, when, not if, because you must be, you have to be, you will inherit this love. It will be a heavy love. It will smell of tear gas and prison visits and the salt of endless tears. It will sound like protest chants and whispered prayers and the dreadful silence of a phone that does not ring.

But underneath that, deeper than any sorrow, you will inherit their steel. The unbreakable strand that runs from Gulzadi's bruised body to Mahrang's unwavering eyes to Sammi's hoarse, spirit of Sabiha, Fozia, Mahzeb, Seema, and hundreds of them, relentless voice to your own mother's womb, which chose to create life inside a nightmare.

They took your mother to kill the future.

But you are the future. And you are already a revolution, baby.

So come, little warrior. Come screaming into the air of Bolan. Come with your fists clenched, your lungs hungry for the salt-air of Gwadar. Come with a voice ready to name the mountains of Talaar and the streets of Quetta. The world they offer you is one of checkposts and lies and disappeared mothers, fathers, brother, sisters, wives, husbands, Oh, the half widows of Balochistan. My little baby, you're coming into the world of Zarina, she cannot pronouns her husband's name; her shivering mouth and teary eyes don't allow to say, "Shabbir." The world your mothers are building for you is one of truth, of memory, of ferocious belonging.

With all the rage and love that keeps us alive,
A stranger who already knows you
Dur Bibi