FWP:
SETS == IDIOMS
For background see S. R. Faruqi's choices. This verse is NOT one of his choices; I thought it was interesting and have added it myself. For more on Ghalib's unpublished verses, see the discussion in {4,8x}.
The first line is bizarre to the point of grotesquerie. How can we be expected to visualize a small piece of the heart, on the verge of being swept away by a flood of tears, desperately clutching the 'garment-hem of the eyelashes'? It's almost impossible. Are the eyelashes themselves perhaps like a small fringe, marking the border or 'garment-hem' of the body? Or-- even more crazily-- do the eyelashes wear tiny garments equipped with even tinier garment-hems for the desperate, microscopic heart-fragments to clutch? The whole thing just doesn't compute. We're obliged, under mushairah performance conditions, to wait until the poet deigns to give us some kind of clarification in the second line.
And for once we get it, though not instantly. We have to recognize that the second line is an elaborately formal and Persianized evocation of the proverb ;Duubte ko tinke kaa sahaaraa . Not only is it a proverb, as Zamin says, but there's apparently a Devi bhajan of the same name (how did we ever live without the internet?). The gist of the proverb seems to be remarkably similar to our idiomatic use of 'clutching at straws'. Someone who is desperate will grasp at anything, no matter how flimsy, that offers any chance of refuge. A 'straw' [tinkaa] is probably not going to do the job; perhaps the short, pointy, straw-like eyelashes are similarly destined to fail. But in the meantime, we've had the fun of 'solving' the verse.
More commonly, the sticks-and-straws are menaced not by water but by fire, as in {190,10}.
Asi:
In the flood of tears, the pieces of the heart that come floating along out, seize the garment-hem of the eyelashes. So to speak, 'drowning ones are seeking the refuge of a piece of straw [;Duubne vaale tinke kaa sahaaraa ;Dhuu;N;Dh rahe hai;N].
== Asi, p. 225