This is jealousy, written by somebody too proud to call it that. Every couplet demands the truth, and the demand is always put to a person with no reason to give it: a go-between paid to be discreet, a wine seller with a shop to run, a beloved holding all the cards. Asking people who cannot answer honestly to answer honestly is what suspicion sounds like once it has run out of anywhere else to go.
Sahi sahi comes back at the end of every second line. Properly. Accurately. Straight. And it bends as it travels: tell me exactly, pour it fairly, show me the real stock. Two words, unchanged, doing a different job each time they land, until somewhere around the fifth couplet the asking stops sounding like a request.
The very first line grants something strange. If saying it falsely is wrong, then keeping it hidden is fine. Say nothing, by all means. Then the next line rounds on the messenger and asks for her exact words. He has forbidden the lie, allowed the silence, and still wants all of it. Anyone who has ever announced they would rather not know will recognise the manoeuvre.
Halfway down the vocabulary turns commercial, and the poem gets funnier and sadder at the same time. A heart is picked up and haggled over. A wine seller has a crowd at the door and, presumably, better stock behind the counter. Price, customer, goods. A love affair conducted at the level of a market stall, by somebody who suspects he is being sold the cheap thing.
That the poet is unknown suits it. This happens to poems that qawwals carry: the singer's name travels with the recording and the writer's falls off somewhere along the road. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's recording for Oriental Star is the reason anybody has heard it at all, and it runs far past the printed length, taking each couplet apart and putting it back together. What you are reading is the frame he sings around.
How it rhymes
Every second line closes on the same word — صحیح صحیح
, sahi sahi. That repetition is the radif.
The rhyme falling just before it is the qafiya: The -ana rhyme landing before the refrain: chhupana, batana, pilana, dikhana.
Hearing the two land together at the close of every sher is most of what makes this form sound the
way it does.
