یہ دل یہ پاگل دل مرا Ye Dil Ye Pagal Dil Mera — This Heart, This Mad Heart Of Mine

This heart, this mad heart of mine — why did it go out, wandering? There was a city in this wilderness once. What happened to it, wandering?

Both lines are questions, and both are addressed to aavargi itself, as though it were standing there and might know. Bujh gaya is what you say about a lamp or a fire going out, not a person. And the second line reverses the usual order of ruin. Normally a wilderness swallows a city over time, but here he is asking where the city went, as if it were mislaid.

دشت dasht

a wilderness, an empty plain

آوارگی aavargi

wandering, vagrancy; having no place you belong

Last night a voice with no shape startled me awake. I said, who are you? It said: wandering.

The best-known couplet of the ghazal, and the one that turns wandering into a person. It is built like a ghost story, the shapeless voice, the night, the question in the dark, and then the answer is a common noun. He asks tu kaun hai, who are you, not what are you. He already assumes there is somebody there.

بے شکل be-shakl

without form or face

چونکنا chaunkna

to be startled, to come awake with a jolt

People — how are we supposed to live in a city where thinking on your own is the crime, and the sentence handed down is exile?

He turns and addresses the room: logo, all of you. This is the couplet that gets quoted at protests. The crime is not what you think but that you thought it by yourself, and the punishment is to be put outside the walls. Naqvi never names the city, and that is why the couplet has outlived the government it was written under.

جرم jurm

a crime, an offence

سزا saza

punishment, the sentence passed

These lonelinesses of pain, this desolate journey across the waste — we are bored of all of it. Tell us your side, wandering.

The funniest couplet here, and it takes a moment to notice. He lists the grand furniture of Urdu suffering and then says, flatly, that he is sick of it. Ukta gae is the word for being fed up. Then he asks wandering to talk about itself for a change. It is the tone of two people who have been stuck together far too long.

دشت dasht

a wilderness, open waste ground

ویران viran

desolate, emptied out

اکتانا ukta gae

grew weary of it, had enough

آوارگی aavargi

wandering, a life with no fixed place

When a stray gust of wind asked me the reason for my grief, I wrote it on the wet sand of the desert: wandering.

He does not say the word, he writes it, and he writes it in the one place nothing stays, in front of the one thing that will rub it out. The wind asks the question and the wind erases the answer. Bhigi ret, wet sand, is the quiet oddity: something has been raining in a desert, which is either a small mercy or the reason the writing will not last.

جھونکا jhonka

a gust of wind

سبب sabab

cause, reason

صحرا sahra

a desert

On that side, the vow of faithfulness caught in the line of fire of wild desires. On that side, the thud of the waves, an unbaked clay pot — wandering.

Kachcha ghada is the whole story of Sohni and Mahiwal in two words. She crossed the river to him each night on a fired clay pot. Someone swapped it for an unfired one, and the river dissolved it under her. So he lays out two ways to be destroyed, appetite closing in on a promise, and a promise kept on something that will not hold, and puts wandering in the space between them.

سمت samt

a direction, a side

زد zad

range, the line of a blow

پیمانِ وفا paiman-e-vafa

the vow of faithfulness

کچا گھڑا kachcha ghada

an unbaked clay pot — the one that dissolved under Sohni in the river

Last night I saw the moon alone in a dream. Mohsin, wandering will probably agree with me for good.

Raas aana is what you say about a climate or a food that suits you. It does not mean you chose it, only that you have stopped being made ill by it. After calling wandering a crime and a sentence, he settles for it. The moon does the argument for him: the one thing everybody looks at, always by itself, and nobody calls it homeless.

راس آنا raas aana

to agree with someone, to suit them — said of climates and fortunes

سدا sada

always, for good