The list is the poem. Not one item is an event. Ghalib never reports a quarrel, a departure or a loss you could put a name to. He gives you only the things that stopped arriving, which turns out to be a very accurate way of describing a life going wrong. Nothing breaks. It just stops coming.
Two couplets get quoted more than the rest, for opposite reasons. One is very quiet: he has ended up somewhere so far off that even he gets no news of himself. He does not claim to be lost, either. He says he is definitely somewhere, and the distance is the trouble rather than the location. The other is the loud one and it is four words long. Maut aati hai par nahin aati. Death comes, and does not come. He offers no explanation, and none is needed. Death is close enough to touch and no closer, and Ghalib has nothing further to say about it.
Then the last couplet turns the whole apparatus on himself. With what face could he possibly go to the Kaaba? Then again, no difficulty there, because shame is one more thing that never comes to him. Ten couplets of things that will not arrive, and the final item is his own sense of shame. It is the only one on the list he is pleased about.
The ghazal survives being taken apart. Lift any couplet out of it and the couplet still works, because each one is a finished report of a single absence. Most people who love it never hear the whole thing at once. They carry a couplet.
Begum Akhtar's is the recording most people have in their ears. Jagjit Singh also recorded it. Singers take a handful of couplets and leave the rest, so what you hear on a record is always shorter than what is printed here.
How it rhymes
Every second line closes on the same word — نہیں آتی
, nahin aati. That repetition is the radif.
The rhyme falling just before it is the qafiya: The -ar sound just before the refrain: bar, nazar, bhar, par, idhar, kar, gar, chara-gar, khabar, magar.
Hearing the two land together at the close of every sher is most of what makes this form sound the
way it does.
