===
0721,
11
===
 

{721,11}

jahaa;N se miir hii ke saath jaanaa thaa lekin
ko))ii shariik nahii;N hai kisuu kii aa))ii kaa

1) I should have gone from the world with only/emphatically Mir, but
2) no one is a sharer of anyone's death/'came'

 

Notes:

aa))ii : 'End (of life), appointed hour or time, death, fate, doom'. (Platts p.111)

*Platts Dictionary Online*

S. R. Faruqi:

aa))ii = death

The opposition between jaanaa and aa))ii is fine. How excellently the rhyme has been worked in! A beautiful aspect of this verse is the speaker's style of expression-- there's a bit of grief at Mir's death, a bit of the victory of the loneliness and duress of death. But along with this there's a kind of coldness and unsympatheticness-- if Mir died then what can be done about it, everyone has to die, and has to die alone.

The speaker of the verse is not the beloved. But it's certainly some close friend or loved one. For this reason the verse has come to have a 'mood'. If it were merely a commonplace remark on Mir's death ('Indeed, sir, everyone has to go, and to go alone'), then the effect wouldn't have been created that has been created by the expression in the first line that 'it's true that we too ought to have died with Mir'.

[See also {923,6}.]

FWP:

SETS == OPPOSITES
MOTIFS == LIFE/DEATH
NAMES
TERMS == MOOD

The perspective of the speaker is truly very unusual. The speaker can hardly be the beloved, but it ought to be someone who loves Mir with extreme and rare depth, even passion. After all, we all lose loved ones, but how often do we tell someone (who?) that we 'ought to have died with them'? And not just 'with them' in some general way, as though we were perhaps of the same age and generation, but with 'only/emphatically' them, as in miir hii ke saath . In other words, this isn't a statement that the speaker would make in a casual way. It can't be one of Mir's characteristic 'neighbor' verses, since the 'neighbors' have sympathy but also common sense, and they would hardly consider themselves remiss in not having died along with Mir.

So who can it be who loves Mir that much, that intensely? We really don't have any established character in the ghazal world who could be suitable for the role. No doubt we can always say it's some close friend, but the effect of disproportionate intensity still lingers. Then, as SRF notes, the extravagance of the first line is made all the more piquant by the oddly cool detachment of the second line.

Ghalib certainly uses his closing-verses sometimes to have people express regret and sorrow at Ghalib's death, but there's never this kind of extreme sentiment. Nobody even comes close to thinking that he himself ought to have died with Ghalib. Ghalib seems to suggest (though he never explicitly says) in

G{66}

that he ought to have died with Arif, but that's a very special case in which personal grief causes the poet to break through the surface of the ghazal world into autobiography. We don't get at all the same feeling in Mir's verse. The mystery of the speaker's identity lingers.