gaahe gaahe : 'At times, sometimes, now and then'. (Platts p.894)
;haram : 'The sacred territory of Mecca; the temple of Mecca, or the court of the temple; a sanctuary'. (Platts p.476)
In the idol-temple, Asad at one time used to appear like a practicing follower and servant/slave. Now this Sahib is going to the Holy Place. Now only/emphatically the Lord is his master. Let's see how he'll behave!
SETS == GESTURE
BONDAGE: {1,5}
IDOL: {8,1}
RELIGIONS: {60,2}
For more on Ghalib's unpublished verses, see the discussion in {4,8x}. See also the overview index.
Basically, Asad's action is a 'gesture'-- it is only externally observed, so that we have no idea what it meant to Asad himself. The external observer and reporter, though, is wickedly delightful to listen to. He's a snarky, sneering type, catching up some friend of his on the latest gossip. Zamin does a fine job of explaining how the shift from singular to plural (of respect) verbs shows the disdain the speaker feels toward Asad.
The speaker seems to mock Asad both for his humiliating periods as a 'slave/servant' of the idol-temple, and for his pretentiousness ('His Excellency'), and/or hypocrisy, in later making a show of Islamic piety. When Asad was in the idol-temple, he was a humble slave, he belonged to the idols; now 'His Excellency' is far from being a humble slave of the Lord-- in fact, 'the Lord belongs to him', or 'the Lord is his', or 'he has the Lord'. This doesn't sound much like his servitude in the idol-temple! But of course, our snarky (unreliable?) narrator may just be framing the situation as unfavorably as possible. As so often, we're left to make our own judgment about the situation.
For an almost as sniffy report of Mir's movement in the other direction, see M{7,15}.
Zamin:
[In the first line 'Asad' is referred to with the singular thaa , and in the second line, with the plural chale .] Such a combination of singular and plural is called a shutur-gurbah [a 'camel-cat', an incongruity], and is a flaw [((aib]. But in this verse the combination of singular and plural has created not a flaw, but an excellence. Because the use of the singular instead of the plural shows additional contempt, and this is exactly according to the idiom-- as when you might say to someone, aap ba;Re ((aql-mand bante hai;N ... bevuquuf kahii;N kaa !
== Zamin, p. 408