Recent debates over the writing of history and ethnography in South Asia and the Middle East have asked whether categories such as transnationalism, globalism, and cosmopolitanism are adequate for thinking beyond the state-centric narratives and colonial governmentalities. Within this context, I trace the overlapping geographies of Mekran Coast in Balochistan Province, Pakistan with the larger Indian Ocean world to unsettle received ideas of the imperial and national borderlands as isolated ‘savage spaces’. The territorial boundaries of ethnic Baloch people inhabiting the Mekran Coast are confined to the sovereign states of Pakistan and Iran. Their lived and imagined geographies, however, traverse the vast oceanic expanse via Muscat (Oman) all the way to the clove-scented island of Zanzibar (Tanzania). Despite decades of Pakistani rule and immigration restrictions set up by Gulf Arab countries in the wake of the oil boom of 1970s, shards of these geographies trace an arc over the Indian Ocean through memory, nostalgia, and diasporic networks. Blending oral narratives of Baloch fishermen and African-descent laborers with accounts from the colonial archive, this paper traces these remembered and lived geographies. I follow the movement of Baloch and African-descent bodies through raid, trade, and migration between Zanzibar, Muscat, Gwadar, and Karachi to show the emergent colonial geography being created by large scale infrastructure projects such as the Indo-European Telegraph Line, the North Western Railway Line, and the British India Steam Navigation Company's entry into the Persian Gulf. I suggest that these colonial projects influenced the economic and cultural landscape of port towns on the Mekran Coast and transformed the bodies of African descent people from a site of servitude to a site of 'free' colonial labor.