Well, here is a madly Ghalibian verse, and what a contrast to the facile little 181 ! The first line is so ostentatiously abstract and multivalent that it's quite impossible to figure it out on its own. What is a 'negligence-friend'? Someone who is involved with 'negligence', no doubt-- but how? By accepting it from others without demur, as the commentators generally maintain? Or by pointedly showing it toward others at every opportunity? Or by cherishing 'Negligence' as a friend in its own right? The first line gives us no grounds for choosing any one possibility over the others. Nor, of course, can we decide what it means to claim that one's 'arrogance/mind of weakness is lofty'. It's the kind of thing Ghalib puts together when he wants to keep us guessing. We know it's going to be something paradoxical and perverse, but what beyond that can we possibly say? We're obliged to wait-- and under mushairah performance conditions, that wait will of course be as long as conveniently possible-- for the second line. But as we've been secretly fearing, the second line offers simply a new pair of compared-and-contrasted complexities. The verb kiije is an archaic form of the passive, , 'would be made'; from it we can get no hint of who or what might be doing the 'withdrawing'-- or literally, with the usual elegant Ghalibian wordplay, the 'making vacant of the side'. If this 'withdrawing' is made, then 'even/also the speaker's place is empty'-- if there's withdrawing going on, then he's a part of it. But who or what might be doing with withdrawing, and what is the sequence of events? The grammar is consistent with two possibilities: the withdrawal might come first, then the emptying of the speaker's place (X withdraws, then notices that the speaker's place too has suddenly become empty, since the speaker has instantly reacted with his own withdrawal); or else the emptying of the speaker's place might come first, then the withdrawal (X withdraws-- and in the process notices that the speaker's place is already empty, since he had previously withdrawn unnoticed, or perhaps had never been there at all). Either sequence of events is consistent with the quite inscrutable qualities of being a 'negligence-friend' whose 'arrogance/mind of weakness is lofty'. And what might be the point of such 'withdrawing'? It might of course be a sign of arrogance, disdain, rejection (on the part of the beloved? by some patron?); but it might also be a sign of diffidence, modesty, humility-- in fact of exactly the kind of 'arrogance in weakness' that the speaker might be attributing to himself. And is the 'withdrawing' identical with being a 'negligence-friend', or some kind of consequence of it? And what is the tone of the verse-- proud, humble, ironic, matter-of-fact? There are so many such questions, and we're given so little material with which to answer them, that we really end up inventing the verse for ourselves. Compare the rival exigencies of beloved's and lover's pride in 115,7 . graphics/emptyseat.jpg