Well, here's an example of what I call 'grotesquerie'. As the mad lover wanders barefoot in the desert, his blistered feet are pierced by thorns. They then ooze drops of liquid so fiery and radiant that the road seems to have lamps placed along it, it seems almost to be a carefully planned illumination, some kind of a 'light-show' (for more on , see 5,5 ). The commentators, one and all, firmly insist that the liquid in question is blood. But of course, in that case it wouldn't be appropriate to compare it pointedly to a 'string of pearls', which would be white rather than red. (Ghalib could have used rubies quite as easily.) It seems more probable that the reference would be to the clear serum or fluid with which blisters are often filled. For after all, it's hard to believe the verse would be imagining an infected blister full of whitish-yellow pus; that would surely be too grotesque even for the radically abstract world of the ghazal. Ugh, you'll be saying, why does she have to go into such unappetizing detail? But of course that's exactly my point-- verses like this are not so effective, because we have trouble 'poeticizing' what to us (though maybe not to Ghalib) is a sort of yucky, 'too much information' vision of bursting blisters leaking fluid all along the road. Maybe, as S. R. Faruqi would gallantly maintain, the problem lies only with us moderns, or us Westernized types. Certainly there's nothing inherently problematical about blister imagery-- it forms part of a seamless continuum with lacerated livers and burning hearts and bloody tears and so on. But there's something about the degree of detail that becomes off-putting in some cases-- though not in others. It's an intriguing case study in the poetics of audience response. graphics/lightstring.jpg