FWP:
This late ghazal is one of Ghalib's most famous classics, performed by a variety of singers, with several verses that people often memorize. As best I can judge, this ghazal is (along with {111}) one of his two most commonly translated ghazals; for this reason it comes equipped with a special anthology of translations.
The first line is a plain statement, with no clues about emotional tone. It is being said by someone (the lover, of course) looking back over his whole life and summing it up in a succinct, flat, illusion-free sentence: there was one thing he wanted, and he was not destinhis ed to get it. The second line then makes it clear that the lover will not go on living in any case; that fact arouses no apparent emotion. Rather, the speaker is just taking a single look behind him, and finding a few words to wrap up what his time in the world has been like.
The subtle delight of this verse is the yihii -- literally, 'this', but with an emphatic or restrictive emphasis-- that we find perfectly positioned at the beginning of the last half of the second line. The meter is one with a foot-pattern ABAB and a quasi-caesura, so that the internal half-line break is especially prominent. As with 'this' in English, yihii can be either an adjective or a demonstrative pronoun. (For a similar example involving vuhii , see {7,5}.)
If we take yihii as an adjective, as in (2a), it modifies 'waiting' and identifies waiting as the sole content of the speaker's life. Although he recognizes that it wasn't his destiny to obtain union with the beloved, that wouldn't have stopped him from keeping on waiting and longing for it; he has waited all his life, and if he had lived longer he would have kept on waiting. With a shrug of his shoulders he recognizes the hopelessness of it all; it's just as well that he's now packing it in and moving on.
If we take it as a demonstrative pronoun, as in (2b), it is the subject for which 'waiting' is the predicate nominative. Not only would his life have been devoted to waiting, filled with waiting, but life itself-- and especially living longer-- would itself have have been waiting. How stark and revelatory a statement, and how offhandedly thrown away with a shrug.
This, the first divan occurrence of the word vi.saal (related to the more common va.sl, as in {5,2}), is a good time to make clear my own view about a point sometimes subject to dispute. I think that those who try to sanitize the ghazal into fleshless mystical purity are the counterparts of those who insist on reading the Biblical 'Song of Solomon' as referring only to the love of Christ for the Church, or some similar abstract relationship.
To me it seems obvious that ghazal verses can be (among other things) love poetry in the erotic sense. The words usually translated as 'union' do indeed evoke a vision of lovemaking, of an actual sexual encounter, even though almost always an imagined one. But of course, as is clear from this verse, the very last thing the ghazal is interested in is any kind of cheap sex. Far from it-- it's interested in sex so expensive and even invaluable that it costs the lover his whole life, and more. And since it's so utterly worth it, he doesn't even mind. Even the longing, hope, vision of it is enough to sustain him for his whole life, and would sustain him longer if he were destined to live on.
An example of what seems pretty clearly to be physical union: {97,7}.
Compare Mir's more abstract equation of the lifetime with a period of waiting: M{944,2}.
Nazm:
That is, it was better to die. (20)
== Nazm page 20