For background see S. R. Faruqi's choices . This verse is NOT one of his choices; I thought it was interesting and have added it myself. For more on Ghalib's unpublished verses, see the discussion in 4,8x . This ghazal offers an intriguing illustration of the search for rhyme -words. There are not that many words in Urdu that end in the diphthong and can be worked into a short-meter line before . Ghalib of course uses the obvious candidates: . He also includes the much less common and . But just to show that he's not easily daunted, he casually throws in the Persian grammatical form , and recycles the same form in 196,9x -- which is surely the inspiration for the rhyme . (These two verses, the ones containing , were however not chosen for the divan .) In the present verse, really both lines invoke the 'inexpressibility trope'. The first line does so directly ('Don't even ask!'). Then the second line, thanks to the versatility of (see the definitions above), suggests several possibilities. Perhaps the lover's innumerable griefs cannot be counted at all, or the count cannot be completed (so that the question 'how many?' cannot be answered). Or perhaps in this situation such a question is entirely futile (questions like 'to what length?' or 'how much?' or 'to what extent?' are meaningless in this case). graphics/griefs.jpg graphics/griefangel.jpg