;xiraam : 'Pace, gait, walk, march; stately gait, graceful walk; strut'. (Platts p.488)
The verse has two meanings, and both are enjoyable/subtle. If 'Asad' would be taken as the subject, then the meaning will be that the roses have bloomed; Asad, who is a stranger to the message, is confined in the corner of a cage. The messenger, out of sympathy, says to him, 'Asad, why do you feel grief at imprisonment in the cage? Sorrow and joy, everything is the product of our own hearts. Consider that "the gait/pace, from you; the spring-breeze, from you; the garden, from you"-- so why do you care if they come and go?'....
The second meaning is that it is the fundamental [divine] decree. He says, 'Oh you who have given us the strength and ardor for strolling and amusement, who have set the spring breeze in motion, who have with colorful flowers made the flowerbeds resemble Paradise-- does your mercy require that right amidst the spring season, Asad would remain imprisoned in a corner of the cage?!'
You created the spring breeze and the garden, you gave people permission to stroll around-- but Asad is closed up in a cage. It's devastating!
SETS
BONDAGE: {1,5}
DOOMSDAY: {10,11}
For more on Ghalib's unpublished verses, see the discussion in {4,8x}. See also the overview index.
As Gyan Chand notes in discussing {424x,1}, the addressee throughout this ghazal seems to be the Lord (or else a beloved so divinized that it's hard to tell the difference).
This is a verse in which the lover seems to be a bird; for others, see {126,5}.
But then, maybe the lover only imagines that he's a bird. For what he's really in is not a cage, but 'the enchantment of a cage'. And an enchantment, a :tilism , is an illusory world created by a powerful magician; anyone who has blundered into one cannot escape without special quasi-divine aid. Such enchantments are part of the stock in trade of the dastan tradition, a genre of Persian and Urdu romance narrative (culminating in India in the 'Dastan-e Amir Hamzah') that was a great favorite of Ghalib's.
The first line thus invokes a potent, all-encompassing, inescapable (though illusory) world: the cage. The second line then invokes another such world: the garden. For the caged bird pines for the garden from which he is shut out. And this garden seems to be entirely generated and controlled by the Lord, who is the source of the gait of those who stroll through it, and of its spring breeze, and indeed of the whole garden itself. The Lord thus appears as a kind of all-powerful magician in his own right. So is this 'garden' not itself a kind of :tilism ? Does the speaker not long to escape from one kind of 'enchantment' into another?
Asi:
Oh redresser of complaints, this is the complaint: that it would be the rose season, and springtime, and wretched Asad would be lying imprisoned and downhearted in the corner of the cage! How can this be described?! Although you created the gait/pace; you alone made the spring breeze; you laid the foundation for the garden-- still, why does wretched Asad lie in the enchantment of the corner of a cage?
== Asi, p. 310