Mehlab Naseer

Zar Jan Naseer, better known by her pen name Mehlab Naseer (also spelled Mehlab Nasir), was born on 18 December 1982 in Khairabad village, Kech District, Balochistan, Pakistan. She went to school in Gurhi village, after which her family moved to Turbat to enable her to continue her education. She received a BA in Sociology, History and Balochi from the the University of Balochistan, Quetta, in 2002, and an MA in English literature from the same university, in 2006. She then pursued a second MA at the University of Balochistan, this time in Balochi literature, which she completed in 2008.

Mehlab worked in special education for three years, from 2007 to 2010 in Quetta, the provincial capital of Balochistan, Pakistan. In 2010 she moved to Turbat and started teaching English literature at the Girls’ Degree College and the University of Turbat. She continued teaching until 2016 when she left the country.

Mehlab began writing in Urdu in 2007, and a year later she wrote her first pieces in Balochi. She writes poetry, short stories and literary essays. She is particularly interested in literary criticism. In an interview published online, (251) she talks about the challenges that a woman writer faces in a male-dominated society. She emphasizes that it is only when women overcome their fear of expressing themselves through writing that Balochi literature will be able to fly with two wings.

An anthology of Mehlab’s poems was published in 2019 under the title of Mehlab Taw Ché Gwashay? (Mehlab, What Do You Say?). (252) Some of her short stories have been published in literary journals. She is also a regular contributor to the web-based magazine Balochistan Times. (253) In addition to writing, she does translation work from Urdu and English into Balochi.

In 2014 Mehlab began collaborating with the Balochi Language Project by taking part in an orthography workshop. (254) She visited Uppsala several times to work on the project before moving to Sweden in 2018. Before that she had lived in Oman for two years. Mehlab now lives in Uppsala, Sweden.

The story presented here, Dega kass nést (There is nobody else) is semi-autobiographical, and concerns the time when Mehlab lived in Muscat, the capital of Oman. Among the feelings depicted in the story are love, affection, selfishness, alienation, loneliness, and the pain of exile.