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mautâ : 'The dead'. (Platts p.1086)
raftah : 'Gone, past, departed; deceased, defunct; lost'. (Platts p.595)
maut ānā : 'Death to come; to die'. (Platts p.1085)
āʾī : 'End (of life), appointed hour or time, death, fate, doom'. (Platts p.111)
FWP:
SETS
MOTIFS == LIFE/DEATH
NAMES
TERMS == FRESH WORD; MEANING; 'SABK-I HINDI'If āʾī is the perfect of ānā , we need to find for it a feminine singular subject that's not stated in the verse. The only plausible candidate is maut (which of course is feminine). Here is where the 'fresh word' mautâ really justifies its otherwise clunky-sounding presence, by implicitly validating and even containing exactly the word we need (though grammatically speaking, we still need to consider the word maut to be the colloquially implied subject of āʾī hai ). Of course, the verb tense is not exactly ideal: 'he was gone when death has come' is far less appropriate than 'he was gone when death came', in Urdu just as much as English.
But the only alternative reading is even more awkward. In terms of grammatical tense, āʾī as a noun meaning 'death' (see the definition above) sits very discordantly with the first part of the line: 'he was gone when death is'. So to my mind this secondary meaning works better if it's taken as excellent wordplay.