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0014,
4
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{14,4}

aabaad jis me;N tujh ko dekhaa thaa ek muddat
us dil kii mamlukat ko ab ham ;xaraab dekhaa

1a) the city/town in which we had seen you, some time ago
1b) [that one] in which we had seen you settled/flourishing/happy, for some time,

2) the empire/grandeur of that heart, now we saw [to be] ruined

 

Notes:

aabaad : 'Inhabited, populated, peopled; full of buildings and inhabitants, populous; settled (as a colony or town); cultivated; stored; full; occupied; —city, town... ; —flourishing, prosperous; pleasant; happy'. (Platts p.2)

 

mamlukat : 'Empire, kingdom, realm, sovereignty, dominion, country, province, district, possession; --regal power, grandeur, magnificence'. (Platts p.1068)

 

;xaraab : 'Ruined, spoiled, depopulated, wasted, deserted, desolate; abandoned, lost, miserable, wretched; bad, worthless, vitiated, corrupt, reprobate, noxious, vicious, depraved, profligate; defiled, polluted, contaminated'. (Platts p.487)

*Platts Dictionary Online*

S. R. Faruqi:

In the verse there's an interesting ambiguity. The beloved was settled in the heart for some time; that is, she had made a home in the heart. Now the heart is desolate; that is, the beloved has emerged from the heart. This can mean that now in the heart love for the beloved hasn't remained, or else that the beloved, having made a home in the heart, destroyed the heart. Then the heart was destroyed, then the beloved didn't remain in it either. (The beloved left me, or else the fervor of passion no longer remained in my heart.) From jis and us the suspicion can arise that someone else's heart is being described. There's also an allusion to the toughness [sa;xt-jaanii] of the heart, because the heart remained inhabited 'for some time', and now it has gone to ruin. Compare {66,7}.

FWP:

SETS
MOTIFS
NAMES
TERMS == AMBIGUITY

The 'ambiguity' to which SRF refers is that the first line leads us to think of some other place, since the description is the kind that would be offered to identify some external site ('the place you used to live'). Thus we read aabaad chiefly to mean 'city, town' (1a). Only in the second line do we discover that the reference is to a heart. Thus the associations of aabaad as 'settled, well-populated, flourishing' (1b) form a fine counterpoint with those of ;xaraab (see the definitions above).

Does the beloved's settling in a heart cause the heart's gradual ruin? (On this reading, we saw her indifference run down the neighborhood and gradualy turn it into a slum.) Or is it her leaving that causes the desolation that we now see in the heart? It's left for us to decide. In either case, the 'empire, grandeur' of the heart intensifies the contrast between then and now. It's not just some ordinary provincial town that has been laid waste, but a former imperial capital. In fact, if there were a commentarial tradition for Mir, undoubtedly some 'natural poetry' person would claim that this verse was a reference to the sad state of eighteenth-century Delhi.

Note for grammar fans: How coolly Mir simply omits the ne in the second line! Don't even think about it. It's not something anybody now could get away with. And it's impossible to argue that it's really a truncated participle, because then it would be dekhe . He could be doing the same thing in the first line too, but it's impossible to tell, because the ne would be colloquially omitted along with the subject in any case.