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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
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)
FWP:
SETS
MOTIFS
NAMES
TERMS == AMBIGUITYThe '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.