Verse 21821ardar-o-diivaar
G9
In this meter the next-to-last long syllable may be replaced by two shorts.
1
the abundance of tears created such an aspect/condition of the house
2
that my walls and doors became doors and walls
'Colour, colouring matter, pigment, paint, dye; colour, tint, hue, complexion; beauty, bloom; expression, countenance, appearance, aspect; fashion, style; character, nature; mood, mode, manner, method; kind, sort; state, condition'.
| References | |
|---|---|
| Arshi, Imtiyaz Ali | Ghazal# 58 |
| Raza, Kalidas Gupta | 330-31 |
| Nuskhah-e-Hamidiyah | 101-102 |
| Hamid Ali Khan | Open Image |
That is, the walls fell down and became doors, and the doors were filled up and became walls. (53)
== Nazm page 53
He says, my turmoil of weeping, making progress, has created such a state in the house that the wall has fallen and become a door, and the door has been blocked and turned into a wall. (99-100)
I wept so much that the very state of my house changed. The walls opened up and became doors, and the door, being filled up with mud, became a wall. That is, my constant weeping had its effect, and destroyed the house. (126)
The commentators suggest one possibility: that the lover's copious weeping created a flood that virtually destroyed his house, breaking down walls and unhingeing doors. This is quite possible; for discussion of such cases, see 57,9 .
But it's also possible that the lover's tears so blurred his vision that he couldn't tell doors from walls, but mistook them for each other. The word (see the definition above) seems to tilt toward this possibility, since it has more to do with aspects, looks, feelings than with violent destruction and radical changes in physical conditions (though it can be used for either).
In either case, this is a very clever and delightful example of what I'd call a ' mushairah verse'; for more on this see 14,9 .
In this verse Ghalib not only uses a long, inconveniently specific refrain like 'doors and walls' with ease and grace, but he manages to repeat the same phrase in inverted form just before the refrain-- not only with no feeling of effort or forcedness, but in fact with excellent poetic effect. He well deserves the praise Josh gives him in 58,3 .
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