Nothing in this ghazal has happened yet, and most of it never will. Flowers will not weep. Cruelty will not run unbroken. The world will not be let in. He will not be there. Nine forecasts of things failing to occur, which is far harder to argue with than a complaint, and a good deal lonelier to read.
The opening couplet is a study in graceful leaving. He accuses nobody of anything. He concedes that she will be well supplied with people who love her, allows the gathering its whole future without him in it, and steps out. Kam na honge, they will not be few, is the sort of thing you say about seating.
Two couplets in the middle are almost cruel about consolation. The kind glance, he says, is only briefly on speaking terms with you, and then he offers the comfort that the cruelties will not be unbroken either. It reads as reassurance until you notice that both halves are about things running out. A little later he refuses to call the world heartless, on the grounds that nobody there was ever told what was wrong with him. That is not forgiveness. It is a technicality, and it closes off the last complaint available to him.
Then the eyes get their own couplet, the one place in the ghazal where something is allowed to overflow. If the tears are not permitted to show, he says, the weeping will happen inside instead, where nobody can see it. Anybody who has held a straight face through something already knows the arithmetic is right.
Mehdi Hassan is the reason this ghazal travelled at all. He takes the refrain slowly enough that each negative lands as its own small closing of a door.
How it rhymes
Every second line closes on the same word — نہ ہوں گے
, na honge. That repetition is the radif.
The rhyme falling just before it is the qafiya: The -am ending before the refrain: kam, ham, shabnam, paiham, baaham, gham, mahram, purnam, barham.
Hearing the two land together at the close of every sher is most of what makes this form sound the
way it does.
