کبھی کبھی مرے دل میں خیال آتا ہے Kabhi Kabhi Mere Dil Mein Khayal Aata Hai — Now And Then A Thought Comes To Me

Now and then a thought comes into my heart: that if my life had been let pass in the soft shade of your hair, it might have turned green.

Shadab is what you say about land that has water in it, lush and green and growing, so the life being imagined is agricultural rather than happy. And guzarne paati, had it been allowed to pass, says that permission was needed and never given. Every line here is a might-have-been.

خیال khayal

a thought; something that occurs to you

شاداب shadab

verdant, well-watered, flourishing

This darkness that my existence was fated to have could just as easily have got lost in the rays coming off your eyes.

The darkness is not a mood here. Muqaddar is what was written down in advance, which makes it a term of the contract rather than a symptom. So the claim is that a look could have overturned fate, and the verb he uses for it is khona, to get lost, as though the darkness would simply have wandered off and not come back.

تیرگی teergi

darkness

زیست zeest

life, existence

مقدر muqaddar

fate; what was written down beforehand

It would not have been at all strange if I had turned into a stranger to sorrow and stayed lost in the loveliness of your beauty.

Begana is somebody outside the family, a person with no claim on you and no business in the house. Becoming a stranger to sorrow means grief would no longer have known him well enough to call. It is a very domestic way of describing happiness, and this is a poem in which nobody ever gets to be at home.

بیگانہ begana

a stranger; somebody outside the family

الم alam

sorrow, affliction

جمال jamal

beauty

Your soft body, your half-open eyes. I would have stayed absorbed in these beautiful stories.

Two physical details, and then he files them as fasane, tales, the sort of thing people tell rather than the sort of thing that happens. He is already treating her body as literature, in a passage about a life he never had, which is two removes from anything real and he knows it.

گداز gudaz

soft, yielding; melted

نیم باز neem-baaz

half-open

محو mahv

absorbed, lost in something

Whenever the bitternesses of the age called out to me, I would have drunk mouthfuls of sweetness from your lips.

The bitternesses call him by name, which is how Sahir usually describes politics: as something that comes looking for you personally. And the remedy is measured in ghoont, mouthfuls, a small and countable unit. Even in the imagined life the sweetness is rationed.

تلخی talkhi

bitterness

حلاوت halavat

sweetness

گھونٹ ghoont

a mouthful, a swallow

Life would have gone about screaming with its head uncovered, and I would have got on with living, hidden in the shade of your thick hair.

Barahna sar, bare-headed, is the state of a woman in public mourning, hair loose and uncovered, and it is the image of grief that cannot be kept indoors. He puts that outside the window and himself behind a curtain of hair. It is the most honest line in the first half, because it admits that the life he is imagining would have been a way of not looking.

حیات hayat

life

برہنہ سر barahna sar

bare-headed; the posture of public mourning

گھنیری ghaneri

thick, dense

But this could not happen, and now the state of things is this: you are not here, and neither is grief for you, and neither is the search for you.

The turn, and it takes five words. Then the second line counts down through three stages of losing somebody, each one further out than the last. Losing her. Losing the grief. Losing even the looking. Most poems would stop at the first. This one reports that the machinery for missing her has also gone.

عالم aalam

a state or condition; also a world

جستجو justuju

searching, the act of looking for something

Life is going by in such a way that it seems to have no wish even for anybody's support.

The one that hurts is the flat one. Not that nobody would help him. That the life has stopped wanting help. He has moved outside his own existence and is watching it the way you would watch a patient who has gone quiet, and the word he chooses is aarzu, longing, so what has been lost is the appetite rather than the thing.

سہارا sahara

support, something to lean on

آرزو aarzu

longing, wanting

I have already taken every sorrow in the world into my arms. I am passing now along roads I do not know.

Gale lagana is to embrace, the greeting you give somebody at a station, so the world's griefs are being welcomed rather than endured. If the private life is gone, the progressive answer is to take on the public one. And the next line says he is doing it without a map.

گلے لگانا gale lagana

to embrace, to take into your arms

رہ گزار rahguzar

a road, a way through

Enormous shadows keep advancing in my direction, out of the terrifying thorn-thickets of life and death.

Kharzar is ground given over to thorns, land nobody can walk on or use, and he puts life and death together in one of them. The shadows are not waiting for him. They are coming towards him, steadily, in the present continuous, which is a tense that has no end built into it.

مہیب muheeb

dreadful, awe-inspiring in the frightening sense

پر ہول pur-haul

full of terror

خارزار kharzar

a thicket of thorns; wasteland

No road that leads anywhere, and no trace of any light. My life is wandering about in empty space.

Suragh is the word for a clue in an investigation, so even light has become something you would have to find evidence of. And khala is void, vacuum, the nothing between things. Whatever else this poem started as, by here it has stopped being about a woman entirely.

جادہ jada

a road or track

سراغ suragh

a clue, a trace, evidence of something

خلا khala

void, empty space

One day I will get lost in these same voids and simply stay there. I know that, my companion. And even so, for no reason at all, now and then a thought comes into my heart.

He turns and addresses somebody, for the first time in four passages, and calls her ham-nafas, one who shares your breath, the closest word for a companion there is. Then yun hi, for no reason, which is how he classifies the one piece of hope in the poem. The first line comes back, and by now you understand what the thought costs him and why he keeps having it.

ہم نفس ham-nafas

one who shares your breath; a close companion

یوں ہی yun hi

just like that; for no particular reason