baskih hai ((ibrat adiib-e yaavagiihaa-e havas
mere kaam aa))ii dil-e maayuus naa-kaamii tirii
1) {to such an extent / although} warning/example is a teacher of the vanities/absurdities of desire/lust
2) oh despairing heart, your failure/uselessness became of use to me
((ibrat : 'Admonition, warning, example'. (Platts p.758)
adiib : 'A teacher of manners ( adab ); teacher'. (Platts p.36)
yaavah : 'Non-existent; perished, lost; ruined; — vain, futile, fruitless, abortive, unprofitable; frivolous, absurd, nonsensical, foolish, stupid'. (Platts p.1248)
yaavagii : 'Loss, ruin; absurdity, vain talk'. (Steingass p.1527)
havas : 'Desire, lust, concupiscence, inordinate appetite; — ambition; — curiosity'. (Platts p.1241)
kaam aanaa : 'To come into use; to come of use (to, - ke ), be of use or service, prove serviceable (to); to be of avail, to avail, to stand in stead; to be wanted; to be used'. (Platts p.804)
naa-kaam : 'Disappointed; unsuccessful; discontented; — useless; hopeless; remediless'. (Platts p.1111)
That is, the lesson that I acquired through failures so 'twisted my ears' [in punishment] about the follies of desire/lust, that now it (desire/lust) will not raise its head. He has addressed the heart because it is the source and origin of desire/lust.
Warning/example teaches civility/courtesy [adab] to the follies of desire/lust. My failure kept me too away from desire/lust, and in this way I obtained benefit.
SETS == BASKIH
For more on Ghalib's unpublished verses, see the discussion in {4,8x}. See also the overview index.
The verse takes clever advantage of the possibilities of baskih ; on these see {1,5}. The commentators take it as 'to such an extent', which is perfectly possible, common-sensical, didactically correct. But a reading of 'although' is more intriguing: 'Although warning/example teaches the folly of desire/lust, nevertheless, oh despairing heart, your failure became useful to me'. The suggestion is that the failure of the heart did not deter the speaker, but somehow helped him to pursue some desire. Could this be a Sufistic desire (worldly failure encourages desire to take a mystical turn)? Could it be a desire for death (the failure of other desires intensifies the desire for escape into death)? As so often, it's left up to us to decide.
In any case, the chief and most obvious pleasure of the verse is the wordplay and meaning-play in the second line with kaam , which means both 'work' and 'desire' (on these possibilities see {22,6}).
Then, the verse surely deserves some 'fresh word' credit for the unusual (Persian) word yaavagiihaa , which is made even longer and more conspicuous by its Persian plural ending. This word never appears at all in the official divan.
Asi:
Warning/example is a teacher that halts the follies of desire/lust. Oh heart, since you became despairing, and from it you obtained warning/example-- for this reason your failure has become of use to me, in that desire/lust and confusion and folly have been departing.
== Asi, pp. 278-279