What an unusually interesting test case for my concept of grotesquerie, discussed in 39,3 ! Until I read Faruqi's commentary, it never occurred to me that the verse could possibly not suggest that the pearly raindrops were, or at least might be, fluid from the blisters on the cloud's feet. Now that I notice, I see that on the whole the commentators skirt the issue; without denying the connection, they avoid making it quite explicit. Faruqi considers it a definite 'advantage' that his interpretation removes any need to make this equation of raindrops with blister-fluid. When I thought in the case of 60,9 that the verse went deliberately, amusingly over-the-top (into grotesquerie), Faruqi disagreed, and was willing to entertain the thorns-and-blistered-foot imagery straightforwardly. In the present case he seems to recognize the possibility of the grotesque, and then seeks to rescue the verse from it. Perhaps the thought of being actually rained on by liquid from a cloud's bursting foot-blisters is particularly repellent. He provides a whole paragraph of alternative justifications for 'blister-footed'. Despite his (tendentious?) arguments against the in the second line, I retain it on principle, since I'm following Arshi. There's obviously an element of subjectivity here, and certainly 'grotesquerie' wasn't a category in Ghalib's thinking, or in the tradition as he knew it. (It might be said that the sometimes pejorative term , which means something like 'excessive, extravagant, far-fetched imaginativeness', would have included such verses, but that was a far wider notion.) To my mind the connection between 'pearl-shedding' and 'blister-footed' is so patent, and so solidly grounded in basic physical similarities, that it's hardly conceivable that it never occurred to Ghalib, even if it was not the only possibility he had in mind. Of course, nit-picking is possible either way. One could well ask about the logical priority: if the cloud is so desirous of being kind, presumably it is traveling over the land in order to shed rain. But the blisters surely develop only after it has been running around over the land for a while. So it must surely have had raindrops already available for shedding, even before it had any blisters? But then in reply one could also say, a cloud that sheds any significant amount of rain usually 'rains itself out' and dissipates before long; a cloud that kept running back and forth in all directions thus can't really be showing much kindness or offering much rain-- unless, of course, it then develops fresh supplies of rain from its 'feet' blistered in running. And so on, in what soon becomes an absurd kind of argument. But look at the progression: for a cloud to have 'feet' is fine; for the 'feet' to have blisters is acceptable; but for the blisters to burst and rain down fluid on our heads is grotesque. Is it simply a question of poetic tact we're dealing with here? At the end of his wide-ranging discussion of 92,7 , Nazm gives an example of a verse of Mir's in which a blister is compared to a pearl. He comments on it unfavorably, though not in the same terms that I am using here. Thanks to the doubleness of (on this see 3,4 ), one is able to watch the cloud's journey either as Bekhud Mohani does, marveling at its continuing generosity from the beginning of time to the present; or else as a happening right before our eyes: right now the cloud is passing by, and perhaps its blisters have only recently grown so noticeable. It's also conspicuous that the first line begins with two fancy, somewhat pretentious Arabic words, starting us off with a sense of obscurity and difficulty. By contrast, the vision of the helpful, kindly, self-sacrificing, cloud in the second line is a simple, vivid, pictorial one. And of course to offer us another kind of pleasure, there's the affinity among the eyes ('look'), the head, and the feet. Compare Mir 's similar grotesquerie, also involving admiration for the 'water' from foot-blisters: M 1537,5 . graphics/clouds.jpg