The song is a battle between a flame and the whole atmosphere, and the flame wins every round. The opening passage sets the enemy: the season has stretched, angdai, the rain has spread itself over everything, and a gust of wind is coming that will blow the lamp out. That is the premise, stated as a weather report. The entire song is the refutation.
The refutation comes in the song's most famous lines. Silsila ye chahat ka na maine bujhne diya: this chain of wanting, I never let it be extinguished. The silsila is the chain, the sequence, the long unbroken line of a love, and bujhna is the verb of flames going out. She is doing for the flame what only a person can do: refusing. The lines that follow are the whole song in a sentence: this lamp of my wanting has not gone out, and it will not go out. Na bujha hai na bujhega: it has not gone out, and it will not.
The third passage is the one that gives the flame its fuel. Is diye sang jal raha mera rom rom: with this lamp, every pore of my body is burning. The fire is not something she is guarding, it is something she is made of. And the address to the beloved, ab aaja re mere piya, come now, my love, is the request that the whole vigil exists for. The lamp is kept burning so that he can find his way back to it.
The fourth passage is the song's picture of the separation itself. There was distance, there was judaai ka aalam, the condition of being apart. Her eyes were waiting, and he was there, shimmering and glowing, jhilmilate jagmagate, swaying in happiness. And here, meanwhile, jal rahe the hum: we were burning. The passage does the cruelest thing a love song can do, which is to show both sides of the same moment: his shining and her burning are the same event.
Then the storm arrives in earnest, and the song gives it the whole weather at once. The clouds thundered, rained, the whirlwind came spinning. And the report of the round is total victory for the flame: par tujhko bujha nahin paya hai, but it could not put you out. The final passage turns the flame into a character of its own: this crazy, mad thing, unknown to the world, and the wind, the same wind that tried to kill it, will bring the beloved back to it. Jhonka hawa ka aayega aur iska piya sang layega: the gust will come, and it will bring her beloved with it.
Shreya Ghoshal was new when she sang it, and the song became the proof of her. The film used it for Paro, the woman who keeps the lamp of her love burning through the entire story and outlasts everyone with it. The Universal recording is the one everyone means.
