S. R. Faruqi:

About being trampled under foot, and as a result being smooth, Mir has composed several superb verses. For example, in the third divan [{1194,3}]:

ab past-o-buland ek hai jūñ naqsh-e qadam yāñ
pā-māl huʾā ḳhūb to hamvār huʾā maiñ

[now low and high are one, like a footprint, here
if I was trampled underfoot, then I became finely level/smooth]

For more, see

{328,4},

and

{1584,4}.

One pleasure of the present verse is its history: (1) first we became dust; (2) then we were flung to the wind (that is, we were broken up by the wind; we flew around like dust); (3) then when the dust settled to the ground, we were trampled underfoot; (4) we were trampled underfoot in such a way that we became obliterated; that is, we entered into the ground, or vanished entirely.

Another of the verse's pleasures is in the fact that despite all this, for us the road of passion has not become smooth. Any one of the above-mentioned four situations would have been sufficient for the road to become smooth (because we ourselves had become so low, or light, that nothing could become a barrier in our road)-- but this was not able to happen. Or else, it's possible that the road might have become smooth, but the hardships of passion were not able to become easy (that is, hamvār in the sense of 'easy').

The question in the second line is also fine-- 'Now what more can be possible? We erased our being into nothingness, now everything should have become easy.' In this way the paradox of the theme becomes manifest: that when the speaker no longer even exists, then for him difficult and easy, hard or soft, everything is equal.

Janab Shah Husain Nahri says that the verse is 'about smoothing out the hardships of the road of passion, not about smoothing out the road of passion'. But in truth they are both one and the same. And as I have pointed out above, hamvār is here metaphorical, meaning 'easy'.

[See also {321,9}.]

FWP:

SETS == MUSHAIRAH
MOTIFS == [DEAD LOVER SPEAKS]
NAMES
TERMS == PARADOX

The first line gives us an inventory of progressive sufferings that culminate in the lover's being completely obliterated. As we wait for the second line-- and under mushairah performance conditions, the wait is of course as long as can conveniently be managed-- we speculate where it will go, and we expect the speaker to look back from beyond death and perhaps express bitterness ('such was my life in this wretched world') or reconciliation ('never mind, it was all worth it').

But instead, we find that the speaker brushes aside all these disasters, and is preoccupied only with the prospect of more disasters yet to come. Not until the last possible moment, when we hear hamvār , do we fully realize the nature of his obsession. The most plausible reading is one of contrast-- well, we've passed through all these other hardships, we've endured them, we've even made them seem hamvār -- but how will we be able to make hamvār the ones yet to come? (Will the ones yet to come be even harder? Will the ones yet to come be impossible for an obliterated person to surmount?)

Apparently the road of passion goes on well beyond not just death but even oblivion, and is inexhaustibly full of ever more and ever-new hardships. But of course, the lover is also a madman, so his thinking may well be hyperbolic and/or wrong.

Note for grammar fans: Platts says that shadāʾid is a feminine plural (cf. shiddat , from which we get shiddateñ ), but Mir seems to treat it as a masculine plural, since it's modified by ke . SRF doesn't seem to be bothered about this, so perhaps it's used both ways.