Every second line ends on the same word, tera, yours, and after ten couplets that one possessive has taken over the world. The forests are yours. The mountains, the town, the desert. The rain of kindness and the river of favour. By the end the lover is yours, the disgrace is yours, the poet is yours. He cannot get out from under it, and the proof is the last word of every line, which is never his.
The first two couplets are a scene rather than a declaration, and they are better for it. A crowd, a full moon, an argument, and him standing in it while people keep turning to ask what he thinks. He laughs. He says nothing. Manzoor tha parda tera: your privacy was acceptable to me. He was holding the one piece of information the whole street wanted, and he spent the night protecting her with it.
Most people who know this ghazal know its fourth couplet. He could give up her street entirely, he says, become a wandering ascetic and go. Then the second line shuts every exit in turn. The forests are yours, the mountains are yours, the settlement is yours, the desert is yours. There is no elsewhere left to walk to. Renunciation was the only plan he had, and it leads straight back into her territory.
And then, out of nowhere, the ghazal turns round and slaps her. Yes, yes, your face is beautiful. But you are not all that. Look what fame you have got out of one man's couplets. After eight couplets of surrender that is a poet telling a beloved he made her, and it is the only moment in the poem where he is holding anything. He knows exactly how much of her reputation is in his own handwriting.
The last couplet takes it back and does not take it back. If you want to hear something cruel, he says, come along, the man writes a very good ghazal. Then four things in a row, every one of them hers: your lover, your disgraced one, your poet, your Insha. He hands himself over in instalments, and the final instalment is his own name. Jagjit Singh's recording is how most people know it.
How it rhymes
Every second line closes on the same word — ترا
, tera. That repetition is the radif.
The rhyme falling just before it is the qafiya: The -a ending before the refrain: charcha, chehra, parda, deewana, sahra, be-parwa, dariya, sauda, thama, Insha.
Hearing the two land together at the close of every sher is most of what makes this form sound the
way it does.
