Here is a simple little verse, entirely in structure, so that its questions continue to resonate. But are they rhetorical? ('Of course she doesn't ever listen!') Cynical? ('As if she'd ever deign to do anything of the sort!') Ruefully amused? ('I really don't know why I keep wasting my life on her') Despairing? (Think of 20,1 .) There's one more possibility-- the tone could be deeply suspicious. What if she's now apparently eager to hear the lover's tale of woe, and that too from his own lips? But he's not a total fool. He asks himself what she can be up to, and how probable it is that she's sincere. And needless to say, the answer isn't pretty. Think of the similar, morbidly ominous question in 97,5 . Is it paranoid? (But then, paranoids have enemies too.) In Karachi an elderly gentleman once asked me, in a slightly superior way, whether I liked Ghalib or Zauq better. He nodded knowingly when I chose Ghalib. All you foreigners, he said, like Ghalib because you like fancy pyrotechnics and awkward, unidiomatic convolutions of language. And that's because you're not native speakers of Urdu, not real , so you're not able to appreciate the subtle charms of simple, accurate, fluent, colloquial speech. He smiled at me with sympathy for my tone-deafness. I smiled at him with sympathy for his blindness to the joys of Ghalibian complexity. Nowadays, I'm working on ways to appreciate simplicity and complexity both. Ghalib obviously did, so why shouldn't we? We outsiders who devote years to this poetry eventually become insiders of a sort. And nowadays there are no real insiders left anyway; Ghalib's literary and linguistic world, like Shakespeare's, is one that we all have to work to understand. Even-- or especially-- in the case of (deceptively) simple verses like this one. Notice how uniformly the commentators rave about it. graphics/nonlistening.jpg