Ghazal 373x, Verse 4

Zamin:

baal-o-par-e qumrii = Dust. raah-e shauq vaa kar = Fly.

The meaning is, 'Adopt humility, because the fiber that runs under the dust creates a road to the garden'.

== Zamin, pp. 436-437

Gyan Chand:

The Ring-dove is the lover of the cypress; likewise, he is a 'fistful of dust' [in {230,5}]. A fiber/root runs beneath the dust, and blooms [as a flower]. The garden path, going into the wing and feather of the Ring-dove, has made a road of/for ardor. The way the fiber is under the dust, in the same way in the Ring-dove's wing and feather the road of ardor has come to be under the dust. Since the Ring-dove has ardor for going as far as the cypress, the road of his ardor can be established as the road to the garden. vaa kar can be considered an imperative; or it can be taken as [short for] vaa kar ke and read in relation to the second line.

== Gyan Chand, p. 451

FWP:

SETS
ROAD: {10,12}

For more on Ghalib's unpublished verses, see the discussion in {4,8x}.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

Since the Ring-dove is dust-colored and is always seeking to reach its beloved cypress, the trajectory of its desire may indeed seem to form a kind of fibrous road that runs under the dust and leads into the garden, as Gyan Chand theorizes. Ghalib is after all very fond of connecting strings or threads to roads: for the supreme example, and discussion, see {10,12}.

The idea of a fibrous underground road may be sufficiently strange, but the first line is even stranger: we are (or should be) 'in the seclusion of the wing and feather of the Ring-dove'. Is the Ring-dove to 'take us under his wing', in the sense of the English idiom for 'protecting'?

To me what comes through more plausibly is the sense of 'seclusion, privacy', or even 'a private place' (see the definition above). The space under the wing and feathers of the Ring-dove can only be very small, and must also be of a special, peculiar, abstractly imagined kind. It evokes another such space: the one envisioned by {81,3}, in which 'we are the lamp-display of the bedchamber of the heart of the Moth'. Such spaces may be almost literally unimaginable, but they are very much present in the verses, and Ghalib obviously means to cause us to try to imagine them-- or at least to try to tease out their salient qualities in the context of the verse. The imagination can't digest those strange little bits of grit, but it also can't make them go away.