The House of Poetry

In Arabic and Persian a couplet is a bayt (بیت), and bayt also means a house, or a tent pitched for the night. Every house in this ghazal of Ghalib's gets the same visitor. It arrives at the very end of the line, it says the same two words each time, and each time it means something different.

The words are kyā hai: "what is."

دل ناداں تجھے ہوا کیا ہے آخر اس درد کی دوا کیا ہے

dil-e-nādāñ tujhe huā kyā hai āḳhir is dard kī davā kyā hai

Foolish heart, what has come over you? What, after all, is the cure for this pain?

The text here and below follows the ghazal's page on rekhta.org.

Two knocks in the opening couplet, one at the end of each line. That doubling is the announcement: from here on, every couplet will end with this phrase. In the vocabulary of the form, kyā hai is the radif, the fixed refrain, and the word just before it, huā, davā, rhyming on -ā, is the qafiya. The rest of the anatomy is in What Is a Sher.

Why the knock cannot be ignored#

In an English poem, a refrain can stand apart from the sentences around it. A chorus comes round between verses; a villanelle's repeated line drops in whole and complete. The neighbouring lines do not have to make room for it.

kyā hai cannot stand apart. Urdu puts its verb at the end of the clause, and kyā hai is a question word plus a verb. Wherever it lands, it closes a sentence, which means everything before it in the line has to become the thing it closes. The refrain does not decorate the line. It decides what grammar the line is allowed to have.

So the poet's whole freedom lives in one slot: the word just before the refrain, which must rhyme in -ā, and the sentence that has to bend to reach it.

Across the eleven couplets on the rekhta page, the slot gets filled like this.

The visitor is the same at every door. The house it knocks on is a verb, a noun, a vocative, a postposition, an adjective. Each time, the knock means something else.

The visitor in different clothes#

At the second door it comes as a petitioner.

ہم ہیں مشتاق اور وہ بیزار یا الٰہی یہ ماجرا کیا ہے

ham haiñ mushtāq aur vo be-zār yā ilāhī ye mājrā kyā hai

I am eager, and she is sick of me; Lord, what is going on here?

A lover's complaint, carried upstairs. kyā hai is a real question, and it is addressed to the one listener who ought to know.

At the third door it comes as a stifled confession.

میں بھی منہ میں زبان رکھتا ہوں کاش پوچھو کہ مدعا کیا ہے

maiñ bhī muñh meñ zabān rakhtā huuñ kaash pūchho ki mudda.ā kyā hai

I too have a tongue in my mouth; if only you would ask what it is I want.

The question is no longer asked. It is wished for. kyā hai is now the end of a question someone else would have to put, and the line is full of everything the speaker could say if only it were put to him.

At the fourth door it arrives as an argument.

جب کہ تجھ بن نہیں کوئی موجود پھر یہ ہنگامہ اے خدا کیا ہے

jab ki tujh bin nahīñ koī maujūd phir ye hañgāma ai ḳhudā kyā hai

When nothing exists apart from you, then what, O God, is all this commotion?

Here the rhyme slot is filled by ḳhudā, God, in the vocative, squeezed between the subject (ye hañgāma, this uproar) and the verb. No prose sentence would put it there. The refrain forced the order, and the forced order produces a theological objection: if God is all that exists, the noise of the world is unexplained. The constraint did not limit the thought. It reached in and arranged it.

At the seventh door it comes as wonder.

سبزہ و گل کہاں سے آئے ہیں ابر کیا چیز ہے ہوا کیا ہے

sabza o gul kahāñ se aa.e haiñ abr kyā chiiz hai havā kyā hai

Where have the green shoots and the roses come from? What is a cloud? What is the wind?

The question doubled inside the line, like a child's. And a small trick of the script: havā, wind, is written ہوا, exactly the same letters as huā, "happened," the very first rhyme of the ghazal. The eye sees the same word knock twice. The ear hears two different ones.

At the eighth door the visitor stops asking altogether.

ہم کو ان سے وفا کی ہے امید جو نہیں جانتے وفا کیا ہے

ham ko un se vafā kī hai ummīd jo nahīñ jānte vafā kyā hai

I hope for faithfulness from those who do not even know what faithfulness is.

kyā hai is now the tail of an embedded clause, the object of "do not know." The phrase that opened the ghazal in bewilderment closes this couplet as a flat statement about someone else's ignorance. Same two words. No question mark anywhere.

At the tenth it is turned on the speaker.

جان تم پر نثار کرتا ہوں میں نہیں جانتا دعا کیا ہے

jaan tum par nisār kartā huuñ maiñ nahīñ jāntā duā kyā hai

I lay down my life for you; I do not know what prayer is.

The grammar is the same as the eighth couplet's, and the meaning runs the other way. There, not knowing was a fault in the beloved. Here, not knowing is the lover's whole devotion: he has no use for prayer, having already given everything.

And at the last door, signed with the poet's name, it comes dressed as a shrug.

میں نے مانا کہ کچھ نہیں غالبؔ مفت ہاتھ آئے تو برا کیا ہے

maiñ ne maanā ki kuchh nahīñ 'ġhālib' muft haath aa.e to burā kyā hai

Granted, Ghalib is nothing at all; but if he comes free, what is the harm?

The tone of a bazaar. The ghazal that began by asking the heart what was wrong with it ends by asking what is wrong with taking a poet who costs nothing. Bewilderment, petition, longing, argument, wonder, accusation, devotion, a bargain. The knock never changed.

Constraint as a generator#

It is tempting to say the poet succeeds despite the refrain. The couplets above suggest the opposite. Without kyā hai waiting at the end, there is no reason for ḳhudā to be wedged where it is, no reason for the eighth and tenth couplets to mirror each other's grammar with opposite meanings, no reason for havā to echo huā. The refrain is the drumbeat the dancer has to land on, and landing on it from a new direction each time is the dance.

Every couplet of the ghazal is a fresh solution to the same small equation: make a sentence, in this meter, that ends in a word rhyming on -ā followed by kyā hai. Eleven solutions, eleven different sentences, and a reader hears the arithmetic as a series of surprises. The same principle lets a ghazal's couplets wander as far apart in subject as they like, as in The Ghazal Is a Set of Unrelated Rooms; the refrain is what calls each of them back.

A useful exercise, for anyone who doubts it: write an English couplet that must end on the words what it is. Then another. Then a third in which the word before what it is is not a noun. By the third, the phrase has started choosing the thoughts.

The visitor is still at the door, the same two words in its mouth. It is the house that keeps changing.