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jhuu;Thaa (of which jhuu;T is a variant): 'Lying, false; ... groundless, imaginary; supposititious; delusive, illusive, vain; unsound, invalid; fictitious, invented, artificial'. (Platts p.409)
nishaan : ' Sign; signal; mark, impression; character; seal, stamp; proof; trace, vestige; —a trail; clue'. (Platts p.1139)
;xaraab : 'Ruined, spoiled, depopulated, wasted, deserted, desolate; abandoned, lost, miserable, wretched'. (Platts p.487)
FWP:
SETS == REPETITION
MOTIFS
NAMES
TERMS == PARADOXSRF does an elaborate set of readings, but I'd like to take a different tack. It's a 'short meter'. The second line has only eleven syllables, and five of them-- almost half the line-- are taken up by ;xaraabo;N and ;xaraab , the only important, striking, new word(s) in the line. Obviously, the repetition of ;xaraab becomes the pivotal point of this very short verse.
The question of whether ;xaraab should be read chiefly as 'ruined', 'wretched', 'abandoned', 'drunk' (in the intriguingly parallel English idiomatic sense of 'wrecked'), etc. is surely secondary. All those meanings are powerfully available in the word itself (see the definition above). The real punch comes from the paradoxical quality of the injunction: 'don't make us X ones, X'. Since we are already X, what would it mean to 'make us' X?
It's possible to smooth away the paradox by assuming that the sense would be to 'make us more X'. But that feels rather bland and conventional, and nothing in the verse encourages it. Instead, it's far more effective to preserve and even relish the paradox. Since we are X already, it really doesn't much matter whether friends 'make us' X or not-- except of course for what it tells us about the friends. What we forbid them to do is to give us-- for whatever reasons, including perhaps compassion-- false clues or signs about 'that one' ('him', or 'her', or 'it', with nothing at all to narrow down the possibilities).
What difference would it make to us X ones, if the friends did give us false clues? If we now have no clues, it would give us false hope; or, if we now have true clues, it would confuse us; or, if we have abandoned the quest for 'that one', it would reawaken our interest. But really, this kind of speculation hardly takes us anywhere. The friends' actions could only cause us already-X ones to become X. The damage has already been done. So perhaps the only reason to forbid their behavior is because they would annoy or pester us. Since we are X in any case, there's no chance of any change. Whatever they may do or not do, the final bleak truth can only be that we ;xaraab ones are, and remain, ;xaraab .