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.suurat : 'Form, fashion, figure, shape, semblance, guise; appearance, aspect; face, countenance; prospect, probability; sign, indication; external state (of a thing); state, condition (of a thing), case, predicament, circumstance; effigy, image, statue, picture, portrait; plan, sketch; mental image, idea'. (Platts p.747)
FWP:
SETS == GESTURES; SUBJECT?
MOTIFS == MIRROR
NAMES
TERMS == AMBIGUITY; MEANING-PLAY; PROOFSRF's analysis of Momin's riddling style is, to my mind, exactly right. It's one of the great pleasures of SSA that it permits us to compare and contrast the verses of so many poets.
Somebody broke a mirror; probably it was the beloved, but since (as SRF notes) the subject is omitted, we can't be sure. More to the point, we can't say with any confidence why the beloved, or the lover, or whoever it was, broke the mirror. Breaking the mirror was a non-verbal gesture, without any accompanying words, so its meaning to the gesturer must remain only a matter of speculation.
The speaker feels that he knows the meaning of the gesture, and thus its futility, since apparently in his view it is negated by his own possession of .suurat-aashnaa))ii . The obvious ('prima facie'?) reading for .suurat is of course 'face', but it has a remarkable variety of other meanings (see the definition above); in a verse this ambiguous and minimalist, quite a number could be brought in and used to create Sufistic or other open-ended possibilities. For the heart itself is well known in the ghazal world to be a mirror; the beloved might thus have broken the lover's heart/mirror-- only to discover that he still had unexpected resources.
Mirror imagery, which so clearly invites metaphysical abstraction and multivalence, is characteristically Ghalibian. Here's one Ghalibian case in which the beloved explicitly breaks what sounds like a strange kind of mirror, and here too it's not clear why; although the lover doesn't seem to have the inner resilience that Mir's speaker does in the present verse:
G{16,2}.
But Ghalib has no monopoly. Here's a broken-mirror verse by Mir that registers right up there at the top of the ambiguity meter:
{120,2}.