FWP:
SETS == WORDPLAY
LIFE/DEATH: {7,2}
A verse of wordplay (and meaning-play too, as Faruqi would point out). Fortunately-- and perhaps by no coincidence, since the mental move is so basic-- we can capture some of it very well in English. 'We're dying to die' is an excellent colloquial counterpart for the first line, and captures its ostentatiously paradoxical quality.
Alone among the commentators I've looked at, Bekhud Mohani claims to point to a special idiom: aatii hai par nahii;N aatii , he says, means something like 'doesn't by any means come'. Perhaps it would then be similar to bhuul kar bhii nahii;N aatii , which literally means 'even accidentally/forgetfully doesn't come', but has the sense of 'doesn't by any means come'. (There's also the related idiomatic expression of the form banaa))e nah bane , 'even upon being done, wouldn't get done'-- or, 'doesn't by any means get done'; see {191,8} for more on this.) Does, or did, this exact idiom really exist, or is Bekhud Mohani improvising a bit? I don't know.
Other commentators have no trouble finding other ways to
read the second line: death comes (to everybody), but doesn't come (to the speaker),
for example, as Bekhud Dihlavi proposes. Far more potent, however, is the
more general sense in which the night of separation is one long near-death
experience, without the closure or release of actual death-- the sense perfectly
captured in the second line of {20,8}.
Nazm:
The first marnaa is hypothetical [majaaz] and conveys an excess of ardor; the second marnaa is in its true meaning. (174)
== Nazm page 174