Some months ago I wrote about Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib’s fascination with silence, discussing a ghazal from his mustarad kalam. Continuing with this ghazal, some of the verses puzzled me because I could not make the connection between the first and second line. Vajahat Ali Sandilvi and Gyan Chand Jain’s commentary helped, as did Professor Muhammad Mujeeb’s English translation. My best recourse is, of course, my father, Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, without whose help I couldn’t have untangled Ghalib’s arcane skein of thought. I will explain verses three and four here.

[The lover’s tenacity of life is a springtime of wonder/ The dying lovers’ blood acts like the henna on death’s feet — all this from you.]

Sandilvi does not go into the details of how blood becomes henna on death’s feet. He writes, “Life has to struggle with death. In the process, the blood of the dying becomes henna on death’s feet. This means that although God has made death conquer life, life does hold death at bay.”

Jain rightly refers to a Persian idiom: pa ba hina bastan [to be unable to walk]. He also explains sakht jani as tenacity of life. The beloved’s admirers are slain by her dazzling manifestation, but their blood becomes henna on death’s feet, so their sakht jani keeps death at bay.

Here Ghalib uses metaphor within metaphor. When the beloved applies henna to her feet she cannot walk. If death’s feet were hennaed, it would be unable to walk too. The lovers take their time to die; this is a favourite theme of Ghalib’s. The logic behind the theme is the lover’s enjoyment of the moment of death — he longs to prolong the moment; two, the longer he takes to die, the more will be the opportunity for him to gaze at the beloved; and three, the lover enjoys the pain of his mortal wounds because his whole purpose of life is to fulfil what his beloved desires. The beloved desires to give pain, and kill. He is happy to fulfil the beloved’s wishes.

Why do lovers take time to die? Their blood has clogged the feet of death, like the henna. Jain’s interpretation is quite to the point, but he doesn’t go into the niceties or the subtleties of the protocol of love which the young Ghalib executes with brilliance.

The only point that can be made is against the phrase bahar-i-hairat-i-nazzarah. In fact, bahar was enough; Ghalib puts in hairat out of sheer exuberance.

[The pari within the glass and the image of the face in the mirror/ The wonderstruck eye of the bride-dresser sheds tears of blood.]

As I see it, the pari is encased in a bottle. Magicians and occult practitioners (sheeshahbaz) were reputed to be able to summon spirits, paris, the jinn, even the planets. Once she obeyed the summons, the pari was placed in a bottle. It was further supposed that now the pari would do the captor’s bidding, existing in a sort of benevolent imprisonment. The bride-dresser, instead of doing her job of beautification, is enchanted by the beloved’s image in the mirror. She cannot decide which would be more wonder-inducing: the image in the mirror or a pari in the bottle.

Also, it seems to her that the mirror is another bottle in which the beloved’s enchanting face is enclosed, like the pari in the bottle. Both images strike the bride-dresser as adorable, but beyond her reach. She knows that just as she cannot beautify the pari in the bottle, so she is incapable of beautifying the girl whose face is reflected in the mirror. The pari in the bottle may be a trope for mystical vision.

Jain gives a somewhat different interpretation. He suggests that the conjunctive particle vav could be a conjunction of comparison (the ‘and’ is an equaliser, technically, a vav-i-tashbihi.) Jain says, “The beloved’s face in the mirror is so beautiful that it is like a fairy’s visage. The bride-dresser looking in the mirror is awestruck; her eyes redden with appreciation.” (This explanation doesn’t clarify the connection between the image in the mirror and the bride-dresser.)

Sandilvi says the pari is in the sheeshah, but its image is in the mirror; this means that God is not apparent, but His glories fill the world with joy. This is why the bride-dresser’s gaze is wonderstruck and her eyes fill with tears of blood. She loves to adorn herself in the mirror. But Your beauty is unsurpassable and needs no adorning. Seeing a vision in the mirror makes the bride-dresser lose her wits.

The mirror in Persian and Urdu poetry is a symbol/image loaded with multitudes of meaning. A common one is that the heart is a mirror in which the beauty of God, or the beloved, is reflected. Conversely, a mirror is like the heart. It reflects whoever cares to come in front of it. Since the mirror remains silent, it means that it is wonderstruck. The cleaner the surface, the sharper the image; the sharper the image, the greater the wonder of the mirror. When we look in the mirror we can see ourselves as we are. The mirror doesn’t lie. But again, it produces illusions that can be magical. What one sees in the mirror is intangible and yet it looks indistinguishable from the reality it reflects. Another way of looking at the trope ‘mirror’ is that since pre-modern mirrors were made of steel or bronze or similar metal, they could be affected by scratches or rusting or dust and so on. Thus, they always needed to be polished. This symbolism of dust or blemishes in the mirror is that the heart, too, can become diseased or corrupt and may need purification.

Ghalib always had a penchant for the mirror as a trope or symbol or metaphor. His early poetry, especially, abounds with the mirror in one or more of its many meanings. It has to do with his perception of the nature of things. Individual perception of objects can be different. The objects themselves can be illusory. The reflection, the aks, in the mirror, is open to transformation or interpretation. We cannot see God but we can see His reflection in objects around us. The bride-dresser, it seems to me, is a symbol of God’s adorer, and she weeps tears of blood, for there is no way that she can approach that Forbidding Beauty.

The columnist is associate professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia, currently writing a commentary on Ghalib’s mustarad kalam

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, June 25th, 2017