S. R. Faruqi:

a;sar = sign, trace

Both lines are extremely fine bearers of 'dramaticness'. The word jalvah has been most excellently used. The beauty of a lifetime, its glitteringness, its quality of swiftly passing-- all these things are presented through jalvah . 'Lightning' heightens it. Since the act of blinking is not mentioned directly, he has created dramaticness in the first line; in the second line, the insha'iyah style of speech has completed the dramatic effect.

When the speaker lifted his eyelids and looked, then it seemed that the lifetime manifested itself like lightning. Lightning flashes and disappears; it leaves no trace. In this regard 'I did not find any trace' is not only an ornamental expression, but rather becomes a 'proof' of the lifetime's being barq-jalvah . This is what is called 'joining one word to another' [laf:z ko laf:z se paivast karnaa]. If he hadn't said barq-jalvah in the second line, then the power of the first line would have been lessened. And if he hadn't said 'I did not find any trace' in the first line, then the full force of barq-jalvah would not have been apparent.

Then, when the speaker lifted his eyelids and looked, there was no trace of his lifetime [((umr] , but there was life [zindagii]. Otherwise, it would have been impossible to lift his eyelids. From this it appears that the meaning of ((umr is 'youth', which obviously seems to be very brief.

FWP:

SETS == KYA
MOTIFS == JALVAH; LIFE/DEATH
NAMES
TERMS == CONNECTION; DRAMATICNESS

What SRF here calls 'joining one word to another' is of course part of the general concept of 'connection' [rab:t], one of the great desiderata of the ghazal world.

Although no doubt the idea underlying the verse is something like 'I blinked, and my life was over', how greatly superior is the way the verse makes us work for it! When under mushairah performance conditions we hear the first line alone, we can't tell what's going on. Was the speaker asleep? Was he hiding his eyes from something, or closing his eyes to something? What was the something of which there was then no trace? To say 'when I lifted my eyelids" instead of 'when I blinked' may seem like a small difference, but how well it works! It forces us to frame the idea of blinking for ourselves-- which we can't do after hearing the first line alone.

When we finally hear the second line, we can then realize that 'when I lifted my eyelids' refers to a blink-- or rather, to half a blink, since there's no reference to the initial closing of the eyelids. To separate a blink into two halves reinforces the idea of the speaker's concern with extremely brief intervals of time. As SRF observes, the Persianized compound barq-jalvah makes brilliant use of the two basic senses of jalvah as both 'manifestation' and 'radiance'.

And finally, there's the enjoyableness of kyaa , with its two possible readings: the exclamatory ( 'with what haste, how speedily you went!') and the genuinely (or sarcastically) interrogative ('what was the hurry, why such haste?').

Compare Ghalib's treatment of the same classic theme:

G{152,1}