This is a poem about protecting somebody at your own expense, and it takes until the second couplet to work out that this is what you have been reading. He is not being mysterious for effect. He will not answer because the answer would name the person asking, and there is a room full of people listening. So the story of his life is the price of her name, and he hands it over without complaint.
Phir sahi is the phrase for settling: all right, that will do, some other time. It is how you accept a smaller thing than you asked for. So every couplet closes the question the same way, politely, with the door left open for a later that never arrives. The poem finishes without ever paying up, and that is not a poem left unfinished. Postponing is the subject.
The third couplet is where the poem stops being about one woman and becomes about a whole city. In the city of friends, he says, without a shred of bitterness, and the absence of bitterness is what makes the phrase land. These were his friends, genuinely. The arrows still came from inside the circle, and he still called out, kis kis ko, to this one and this one and this one. Every door he tried gets the same polite postponement.
Then the last couplet refuses even to give the result. Asked who won and who lost, he says: that story another time. It sounds like a question that could be settled, and his silence is the poem's final honesty. In this kind of ending, the scoreboard stays blank.
Ghulam Ali's is the recording most people know it from. He lets the refrain carry the poem, which is the only sensible way to sing something whose entire method is holding back.
How it rhymes
Every second line closes on the same word — یہ کہانی پھر سہی
, ye kahani phir sahi. That repetition is the radif.
The rhyme falling just before it is the qafiya: The -ara sound just before the refrain: maara, hamara, tumhara, pukara, haara.
Hearing the two land together at the close of every sher is most of what makes this form sound the
way it does.
