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As a literature student, I always read a book’s dedication first, curious to know whom the writer or translator chose to remember before the story even begins. When I opened Nazuk, I did the same. The translator’s dedication consisted of a single line: “For the fishermen of Balochistan.” Those words carried me instantly back to a tragedy from my childhood — one I have never been able to forget.

I come from Pasni, a coastal city in Balochistan where life is inseparable from the sea. From my own family to nearly every household around us, livelihoods depend upon fishing. The sea is therefore more than a landscape: it is a source of sustenance, hope and, at times, devastation.

I had not begun reading Nazuk with the intention of reviewing it. But the memories stirred by its dedication — and later by its portrayal of the sea were too powerful to ignore. The novel understands what the sea means to a fisherman: when calm, it offers relief and livelihood; when violent, it can sweep everything away.

I remember returning home from school one day, my bag still perched on my shoulders, and finding an unusual number of vehicles outside our house. Confused, I stepped through the door and saw a crowd of both familiar and unfamiliar faces. Panic rose within me as I searched for my mother. I threw down my schoolbag and found her sitting with her head in her hands, grieving and cursing a fish — the Indian mackerel, known in Balochi as seem and bangda.

I bent down beside her. My cousins were crying. Then I noticed my aunt sitting silently, her head lowered beneath a large chadar. My mother told me that her cousin, who was also my Amma’s brother-in-law, had gone to sea to fish for the seasonal bangda. All the fishermen aboard were lost, except for one man who knew how to swim and was later rescued by a larger fishing launch.

From that day onward, bangda was never cooked in our home again, and my aunt and her two daughters never returned to the sea. Her sons eventually did. They became fishermen because, despite all they suffered, the sea remained their only livelihood.

That is the cruel paradox of coastal life: the sea that takes away a fisherman may still be the sea to which his offspring must return.

Published in 1976, Nazuk is widely regarded as the first novel in the Balochi language. Its author, Sayad Zahoor Shah Hashumi (1926–1978), was a major figure in modern Balochi literature. Nearly five decades later, the novel has reached a wider readership through Fazal Baloch’s English translation. A writer, translator and academic, Baloch primarily translates Balochi literature into English. His translation of Nazuk was featured as part of the Himal Fiction Fest 2026, bringing this foundational work to readers beyond the Balochi-speaking world.

The novel appears to be set along the Makran coast, with much of its action unfolding beside — and in — the sea. At its centre is Nazuk, who is married at the age of 15 and by 28 has been widowed thrice. Each of her husbands is a fisherman; each goes out to sea and never returns. When her third husband dies, she is labeled a ‘husband killer’. When she agrees to marry again, she sets a condition: her future husband must not go to sea. Her life is therefore shaped by the repeated cycle of departure, societal stigma and loss that defines many coastal households.

Although Nazuk remains the novel’s central figure, Hashumi ensures that the surrounding characters are never reduced to mere background. Each is given enough space to breathe, speak and contribute to the social world of the narrative. Divided into 19 brief sections, the novel gradually reveals different realities of Baloch society: domestic tensions, local gossip, economic hardship, communal bonds and the quiet endurance of women.

The familiar claim that literature mirrors society feels especially appropriate here. Reading Nazuk as a Baloch reader, I felt as though Hashumi had moved from house to house, listened carefully to conversations ordinarily dismissed as gossip, and carried those voices onto the page. The novel is brief and outwardly simple. It offers neither the machinery of a mystery nor the suspense of a thriller. Its power lies elsewhere: in its ability to make everyday life feel immediate, as though a lived reality were unfolding before the reader’s eyes.

Throughout the novel, Hashumi places two sharply contrasting figures alongside one another: Nazuk, a woman defined by dignity, endurance and resilience, and Gazabek, the town’s powerful master, whose authority is marked by corruption, cunning and sexual predation. Nazuk survives repeated incidents of personal loss without compromising her moral strength, while Gazabek exploits his social position to manipulate those around him.

Their parallel presence creates the novel’s central ethical contrast: one character possesses little power but great integrity; the other commands influence yet remains morally impoverished. Through them, Hashumi exposes the distance between social authority and genuine human worth.

Much of Nazuk unfolds through dialogue and conversations. Rather than interrupting the narrative with explicit social commentary, Hashumi allows the prejudices of the community to reveal themselves through the language its characters use. 

This becomes apparent as early as chapter two, when Nazuk and her first husband, Meeran, are introduced. One night, Meeran’s crew arrives to take him fishing despite the violent wind. The men suggest postponing the journey, but Meeran, the boat’s captain, dismisses their caution by declaring that their hearts are “as weak as a woman’s”. He sails out, and neither he nor his boat return. 

The following chapter widens this criticism. As families gather by the shore, anxiously waiting for their loved ones’ boats to return, a man from Gazabek’s household appears to be scanning the sea through a telescope. The crowd assumes he is searching for the missing fishermen when, in fact, his gaze is fixed on the women whose clothes have been pressed against their bodies by the strong wind. The scene exposes how easily women are reduced to objects of observation, even at a moment when they are themselves confronting grief and uncertainty.

The same chapter turns gossip into an anatomy of patriarchal honour. One man claims that Gazabek fears his wife because she knows enough about his misconduct to expose him. Another replies, “A man who fears his wife has no dignity left.” Through such exchanges, the novel reveals the contradictions of this moral order: a man’s corruption may be tolerated, yet his wife’s knowledge of it threatens his dignity; honour is presented as a family possession, but its burden is placed overwhelmingly upon women.

The pattern repeats in chapter 11, when Nazuk urges her second husband, Jami, to listen to his crew and avoid sailing in dangerous weather. He replies, “You’re a woman, so I don’t blame you for saying that.” Like Meeran, he mistakes caution for feminine weakness, leaves for the sea and never returns. Elsewhere, a grieving man is mocked for “crying like a woman”. Ordinary human responses to danger and loss are repeatedly degraded through their association with women.

Chapter nine extends this critique through the story of Gulok, a woman divorced merely for attending a friend’s wedding without her husband’s permission. As the women discuss her fate, one remarks that “men are always suspicious of women”, while another observes that, with time, a woman learns that “whether she is innocent or guilty, she will be blamed”. Their conversation reveals a social order in which accusation itself becomes a form of control: a woman’s conduct is judged not by evidence, but by the suspicions projected onto her.

The dialogue becomes even more revealing when the women explain that a husband may begin to regard his wife as modest and virtuous simply because she has stopped questioning him or answering back. Yet the conversation also exposes how the patriarchy is sustained through denial. Rather than holding the husband accountable, someone insists that “he is not like this” and that another person must have “poisoned his ears”. His cruelty is treated as an external influence, while the woman is left to bear its consequences. Through Gulok’s story, Hashumi shows how women are not only judged by men’s suspicions but are gradually trained to silence themselves in order to survive them.

Yet Hashumi does not present women solely as victims of a patriarchal order. Alongside their vulnerability, he emphasises their resilience, labour and economic importance. From the opening chapters, women are shown selling food along the shore, participating directly in the informal economy that sustains coastal life. Their work may appear modest, but it forms an essential part of the community’s survival.

Nazuk becomes the strongest embodiment of this independence. Widowed and responsible for three children, she not only resists Gazabek’s sexual advances but also acquires a fishing boat of her own. The boat supports more than her immediate household: the fishermen who work on it and their families also depend upon the income it generates. Nazuk’s economic agency therefore extends beyond self-preservation and becomes a source of collective livelihood.

The novel similarly portrays marriage as a form of shared economic labour rather than a relationship sustained by men alone. Jami’s father is an experienced fisherman, yet Jami’s mother supplements the family income by selling fried kingfish. Similarly, when Nazuk is first married, her father gives her a boat, which Meeran later takes out to sea. 

When she subsequently marries Jami, who possesses little of his own, Nazuk sells her gold so that he can acquire a boat. These details quietly overturn the conventional image of the man as the sole provider. In Nazuk, women repeatedly finance, support and stabilise the very households in which their authority is often denied. 

This resilience, however, exists beside a darker reality. Not every woman is able to escape Gazabek’s power. A young woman is manipulated, becomes pregnant and is then married off to one of his associates, allowing him to conceal the consequences of his abuse. Other women are exploited through financial dependency: Gazabek assists them or their husbands, only to demand sexual access in return. 

Through this contrast, Hashumi shows that economic vulnerability and sexual exploitation are closely connected. Women’s labour sustains the community, yet the structures of power surrounding them frequently deny them security, dignity and protection. Nazuk’s independence is therefore not merely a personal achievement. It is also a form of resistance against a social order that allows men such as Gazabek to turn wealth and influence into instruments of coercion.

At certain points, however, the author’s hostility towards Gazabek becomes very explicit, such as when Nazuk’s cousin Omar brings her complaint before Gazabek, he summons her and listens to the case while “fidgeting with his fingers, at times licking his lips or blinking rapidly like a bitch”. This description reduces him to a restless, almost animal-like figure, making his predatory intentions visible yet the comparison is also troubling. By using “bitch” as a term of degradation, the narration relies upon the same gendered vocabulary that the novel appears to criticise elsewhere. 

The novel’s concerns also extend to corruption and misrule. The Vali’s sycophants engage, with his approval, in smuggling and other illicit practices that inflate prices and create shortages, pushing fishing families towards hunger. They also seek out women for his private pleasure. Justice fares no better: the qazi demands bribes for favourable verdicts, protecting those who can pay and condemning the poor. Political and judicial authority thus reinforce, rather than restrain, exploitation.

Ultimately, Nazuk derives its power from recognition. Through the sea, Hashumi captures the precarity and endurance of coastal life; through Nazuk and Gazabek, he sets dignity against corrupt authority; and through everyday conversation, he reveals how injustice becomes embedded in ordinary life. Decades after its publication, the novel remains unsettling because many of the realities it records still endure.