Ghazal 266x, Verse 1

Zamin:

That is, the way I have seen trees finding nourishment from roots hidden under the ground, in the same way I have found a shy glance welling up from under the dust of collyrium.... It's a simile, and only a simile.

== Zamin, p. 88

Gyan Chand:

reshah daviidan is for the fiber to grow [ugnaa]. Under the ground, the fiber wants to quickly run outward. But because of the ground, its pace becomes slow. The glance/gaze of the collyrium-smeared eye too has just this mood. Because of the collyrium, the journey of the glance/gaze becomes slowed. So to speak, the shy glance has a similitude with a fiber, and collyrium is the dust that borders it. The practice of those with coquettish eyes is that after being adorned, they are shy, and don't manage to lift their gaze toward their lovers.

== Gyan Chand, p. 119-120

FWP:

SETS
GAZE: {10,12}

For more on Ghalib's unpublished verses, see the discussion in {4,8x}. See also the overview index.

On the nature and use of collyrium, see {44,1}.

The little tendril of a new plant pokes up from the ground with some difficulty, having to work its way through layers and clumps of dirt. But then it appears suddenly, almost triumphantly, but also perhaps bashfully, since its stalk is often flexible at first and can hardly sustain its own weight.

Thus this plant-tendril can be said to resemble the glance or gaze of an eye that has been adorned with the sooty powder of collyrium-- a glance that has to slowly, shyly, make its way out from beneath this 'dust'. Zamin sniffily says that there's really nothing in the verse except this simile. He's almost right.

But there is one more element: the kamii;N , a word used much more subtly in Persian than in Urdu (see the definitions above). In the sense of a 'lurking-place' where observers can see without being seen, it can be what hunters call a 'blind'; it can also refer to those who 'lie in wait' in such a blind. Steingass's final sense, 'an entering into an affair which one does not understand', evokes the haplessness of the prey for whom those lurkers are lying in wait. (For another example of the use of kamii;N , see {266x,2}.)

So the innocent little plant-tendril, and the shy little glance, are in fact crafty and well-equipped hunters, lurking in their blind until the moment when, with a charmingly tentative little movement-- they pounce.