The song is an intervention dressed as a compliment. Nobody says the word divorce anywhere in it, and everybody in the film knows what it is about. The technique is to take the smile seriously and find it out: you smile so much, the song begins, as though the smiling itself were the evidence. The poem never accuses. It just measures, and the measurements are devastating.
The second passage does the measuring with a single line. Wetness in the eyes, laughter on the lips. Kya haal hai, kya dikha rahe ho: what is the state of you, what is it that you are showing. The word dikha rahe carries the performance in it, so the question is really asking which of the two faces is the act.
The third passage is the one that made the song famous, and it is a warning with a time limit in it. Keep drinking those tears, it says, and the drinking itself will turn them to poison. Zeher is the word for venom, and the line is doing chemistry: what is swallowed as grief becomes poison by the act of being swallowed. Then the wounds: wounds that time itself has been healing, waqt bhar chala hai, and he asks why the smiling man keeps reopening them. It is the kindest accusation in the language.
The last passage moves the whole thing onto a higher floor. Fate is a game of lines, and you are losing to the lines. The pun is the poem: the lines of the palm, the lines of fate, the game of chess where the loser says maat kha gaya. The man who has lost his wife is losing to the marks on his own hand. The song ends there, with the smile still in place and nothing resolved.
Arth was Mahesh Bhatt's semi-autobiographical telling of his own affair, and Shabana Azmi's performance in it won her a National Award. This song is the one that left the cinema hall. Jagjit Singh recorded it with his usual economy, which is exactly what the poem needs, since the poem is all understatement and would collapse under decoration. The Saregama reissue is the recording everyone knows.
