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ik gard-e rāh thā paʾe
manzil tamām rāh
kis kā ġhubār thā kih yih dunbālah-gard thā
1) there was, road-traversing, a
single/particular/unique/excellent [thing], {before / in
search of} the halting-place, for the whole road--
2) whose dust-cloud was it, that was {such a / 'this'}
pursuing-wanderer?!
gard : 'Going round, revolving; traversing, travelling or wandering over, or through, or in (used as last member of compounds, e.g. jahān-gard , 'One who has travelled over or around the world);— s.f. Dust; —the globe; —fortune'. (Platts p.903)
ġhubār : 'Dust; clouds of dust; a dust-storm; vapour, fog, mist, mistiness; impurity, foulness; (met.) vexation, soreness, ill-feeling, rancour, spite; affliction, grief; perplexity'. (Platts p.769)
dunbālah : 'After, behind, in pursuit'. (Platts p.527)
FWP:
SETS == EK; FILL-IN; REPETITION
MOTIFS == ROAD
NAMES
TERMS == DRAMATICNESS; IHAMIt's an insha'iyah verse with a vengeance, and that haunting, unanswerable (or variously answerable, which comes to the same thing) question (or exclamation) in the second line fills the verse with a mysterious melancholy. Whose dust-cloud was it? Whose indeed! The possibilities multiply enticingly. Marshal your knowledge of the ghazal universe, look into the depths of your own mind and heart, and answer the question for yourself. And of course, you can and must answer it afresh every time you contemplate the verse.
The grammar too has been made a bit tricky and initially deceptive. Since gard as an independent noun meaning 'dust' is feminine (see the definition above), the verb thā is confusing. In fact it renders the whole first line uninterpretable (whereas if there had been thī instead, the line would have been quite clear and simple). We know that we need more information (we need a subject for the verb), and we know we'll have to wait to hear the second line before we can get it. And of course, under mushairah performance conditions, we'll have to wait as long as is conveniently possible.
Then when we hear the second line, we realize that the subject of the verse has to be the ġhubār , the semi-personified 'dust-cloud' that has been showing itself as an extraordinary kind of mysteriously motivated 'road-traversing' thing. The gard-e rāh confuses us because of its grammatical environment (it's not the subject of the nearby verb, as we first wrongly expect). Instead it's an adverbial phrase, and the real subject of the verse is the masculine ġhubār , which clears up our problem at once.
When at the very end of the second line we hear dunbālah-gard , we're alerted by the dunbālah and surely don't think the gard means 'dust' (except in a pleasurable but marginal word-play sense). So if we can say that in some loose sense there's an iham, it's not between the two occurrences of gard but is based instead on the enjambment and complex grammar of the first line.
As SRF says, ġhaẓab kā shiʿr kahā hai . (I'm delighted to have come up with 'devastating' to capture the sense of ġhaẓab kā ).