Underneath the swagger sits a failure everyone recognises: knowing something and not being able to say it. For three couplets it sounds like a man who has worked life out. Fall in love and then talk to me. Our eyes barely met and the whole air went bright. Loose hair taught the seasons how to write poetry. It is confident, generous, faintly showing off.
Then the fourth couplet arrives and none of it survives. He could never get the words out. She never worked out what the silence was. Two people standing close enough to touch, each waiting for the other to do the arithmetic, and neither of them managing it. Everything learned in the first three couplets turns out to have been no use at all at the one moment it was needed.
The reason it reaches people who never go near Urdu poetry is simple. Nobody is cruel in it and nobody is at fault. It is the commonest failure there is, described by a poet who refuses to make it sound noble.
What most people take home is the hair couplet. Scattered hair teaching the seasons how to write, lowered eyes explaining what it is to drink. Nothing is being compared to anything else. Beauty is simply the instructor, and the natural world is taking notes.
Jagjit Singh sang it in Sarfarosh in 1999, which is how most listeners met it. Fazli wrote a great deal for film, and this is the piece that crossed in both directions: a proper ghazal that ended up on a soundtrack without being thinned out to get there.
How it rhymes
Every second line closes on the same word — کیا چیز ہے
, kya chiz hai. That repetition is the radif.
The rhyme falling just before it is the qafiya: The -i sound just before the refrain: be-khudi, zindagi, jadugari, mai-kashi, khamoshi.
Hearing the two land together at the close of every sher is most of what makes this form sound the
way it does.
