===
1219,
9
===

 

{1219,9}

.zu((f bahut hai miir tumhe;N kuchh us kii galii me;N mat jaa))o
.sabr karo kuchh aur bhii .saa;hib :taaqat jii me;N aane do

1) you're very weak, Mir-- don't at all go into her street!
2) show patience/endurance, some more, Sahib, let strength come into your inner-self

 

Notes:

.zu((f : 'Weakness, feebleness, debility, infirmity, imbecility (of mind or body), unsoundness; feeble action (of the heart, &c.); fainting, a fainting-fit, swoon'. (Platts p.749)

 

aur bhii : 'And again, and more, still more, also, moreover'. (Platts p.104)

S. R. Faruqi:

In the background of this verse too is realism. Some days previously, the lover had returned, willingly or unwillingly, from the beloved's street. Through people's nursing and guardianship, his health has somewhat improved. But his strength has not yet fully returned-- and he wants to go right back there.

As much enjoyment as there is in the realism, there's equally much in the fact that the conversation between people and the lover is about the lover's weakness-- that is, they've made the affairs of passion secondary/unnecessary to daily life. And there's as much pleasure again, in the fact that the lover is not being told to leave off going into the beloved's street. He is only being told, 'Don't go right now, get your health fully restored and then go'.

In the first line, kuchh is for expressiveness [;husn-e bayaan]; or again, it can have the meaning of 'for a while, for some days' [kuchh din]. In both readings, the word is very fine, and establishes one more example of the use of small words in a masterful way.

FWP:

SETS == MIDPOINTS; NEIGHBORS
MOTIFS
NAMES
TERMS

The kuchh in the first line is indeed effective; I've tried to capture its idiomatic emphasis with 'at all'. On first reading, that expressive sense is much more piquant than merely the idea of 'for some days' or the like. It becomes a sharp warning: don't by any means do this!

But then, the kuchh in the first line is intriguingly echoed by a kuchh in the second line. The first kuchh can be thought to aim at a more absolute prohibition; but the second one clearly seeks to soothe and relativize. The second one is also what I call, for want of a better name, a 'midpoint': it can be read either with the clause before it ('Show some more [kuchh aur bhii] patience') or with the clause after it ('Let some more [kuchh aur bhii] strength come to you'). There could also be a hybrid reading: 'show some [kuchh] patience' and 'let more [aur bhii] strength come to you'.

The general effect of the repetition of kuchh , and of the way it's used fuzzily and ambiguously in the second line, is to evoke the way sick people are talked to: in a soothing tone of voice, with simple words, with encouragement but also very firmly, with instructions repeated and explained to make sure they are understood. Really the verse is a gem, and the tone is a large part of its pleasure. SRF implicitly, though not explicitly, describes this tone, and I entirely agree with him. This is a verse in which we can talk about 'tone' and point to actual evidence within the verse to justify our conclusions; for more on the problem of tone, see {724,2}.