Interpretation-Ghazal-79

1.

A sigh will create an effect in a life time, 

And by the time your arrogant curls would be tamed, my life will be over.

(By the time your curls become aware of my state, I will be finished off.)

(I would not live long enough for you to become kind.)

(It is a peerless verse.)

(A sort of so near and yet so far. They seem so simple, but then somehow there is no end to them.)

2.

Here every wave is a net and every circle of the net a crocodile's mouth,

Let me see the drop how will be confronted on the verge of success.

(Even on the verge of success, one might not manage to succeed.)

(Ghalib's accomplishment is that he has presented the dangers in most inescapable form possible.)

(In this verse non-descriptiveness too has a special pleasure-giving effect.)

(Raindrops falling into the sea during the month of Swati, if they reach the sea intact, and if they are then swallowed by oysters, are the source of pearls.)

(Do not we recognize in the travels of the drop, the journeys of our own lives?)

3.

Being a lover is a patience-demanding task, and longing is in a hurry to obtain success as quickly as possible,

In such a condition, until the liver turns to blood, and stability and effect would be created in passion, until that time, how would I manage my heart, how would I control it.

(Since my longing is so restless, it will uncontrollably turn the heart such wondrously strange colours and moods during the brief interval before it finally turns into blood.)

(There is no recourse for the heart apart from endurance, apart from you, it does not exists.)

4.

I am persuaded that you would not engage in neglect, and will come quickly,

But while news is in the process of reaching you, I will turn to dust, so what is the cure for that.

(To pull out from this ground such a clear and unexampled verse, this was a task for an accomplished master like Ghalib.)

(When the news reaches you, you will take head, but while the news is on its way to you, here I am finished off.)

(What can a poor lover do but at least tease her, at least enjoy the irony.)

5.

The way the dew evaporates and flicks up from the heat of the sun,

In the same way I too will be obliterated by a glance of favour from you.

(My existence has no more substance than that of the dew, nor can I have more stability or foundation  than it does.)

(When you become kind to me, my life is over.)

(The Sufi term FANAA suggests that the lover might feel about that glance the rapturous delight that a mystic would feel about absorption in the Divine.)

(With friends like you, who needs enemies.)

6.

Oh heedless humankind, the interval of life is not longer than a glance,

Warmth of a gathering, liveness of the gathering of life is as long as the dance of spark.

(The way a spark glitters and then is extinguished, in the same way a human being has existence that is destined to be obliterated after the space of a breath.)

(There is time enough only to cut a glance on the world, not time enough to understand its mysteries.)

7. 

Until death comes there is no salvation from grief,

The candle is compelled to burn, no matter what, until morning.

(Such eloquent and supreme similes do not even occur to anyone except Ghalib.)

(Life and grief are contemporaneous.)

(Death can be a dawn in itself, but sometimes a dawn is just a dawn.)

(The candle which burn or suffer, for as long as it is alive or lit.

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