Ghazal 16, Verse 8x

Gyan Chand:

The 'omen of the gaze' is a method of divination, like the 'omen of the ear': the thing about which you want to have the omen, you keep in your heart, and go among others; and from the first words that fall on your ear, an omen is taken about your purpose. In the same way, the 'omen of the gaze' can be taken: having placed something in your heart, you go outside, and besides the ordinary surroundings, whatever would first come into view-- from that an omen is taken.

The prose of the verse is: 'Don't ask about the disaster of the omen of the gaze. From your arrowhead, like the bud and rose, the glory/appearance of the wound was opened/revealed.

When at dawn we went to take an 'omen of the gaze', then first of all your arrowhead came into view. In the arrowhead, the glory/appearance of the to-be-inflicted wound was clearly visible. The arrowhead was like the bud, and the shape of the wound like the rose. It's clear that the arrowhead will strike me, and a wound will occur. This 'omen of the gaze' turned out to be a great disaster!

The bud and rose can also mean that just as I took an 'omen of the gaze' and first of all your arrowhead was visible, that wouldn't be content until it had made a wound, in the same way the bud and rose had taken an 'omen of the gaze'. Both of them saw the arrowhead. The result of which was that both of them were wounded. The glory/appearance in the arrowhead of the wound, is opened/revealed in the imagination of the beholder. As in a verse of Iqbal's:

;haadi;sah vuh jo abhii pardah-e aflaak me;N hai
((aks us kaa mire aa))iinah-e idraak me;N hai

[the event that now/still is in the veil of the skies
its reflection is in the mirror of my senses]

FWP:

SETS == INEXPRESSIBILITY
ARCHERY: {6,2
GAZE: {10,12} }
JALVAH: {7,4}

Raza p. 227. S. R. Faruqi's choices. This is the eighth verse of the ten-verse ghazal that Ghalib originally composed; in his published divan he included only verses three through seven.

The bud is a small tight compressed little object, more or less triangular when seen from the side; and in it is latent the whole of the wide, round, brilliantly red, fully opened rose. Not only might it appropriately appear as an 'omen of the gaze' to evoke the rose itself, but it also itself creates or gives birth to the rose.

Exactly the same relationship obtains for the arrowhead and the wound. One additional pleasure is aashkaar , which means 'revealed' only because of its basic meaning of 'opened'. The arrowhead has not only 'revealed' the wound by divination, but has also literally 'opened', and thus created, the wound. And as always, jalvah means both 'appearance' and 'glory, radiance', so that the verse can take full advantage of both senses.

When both the rose and the wound are so beautiful and (to the lover) desirable, why is their divination a 'disaster' or 'calamity'? Perhaps because the lover is taking refuge in the inexpressibility trope ('don't ask!'), and is thus using language his ordinary, limited listener can understand. But aafat may also be colloquially used here the way 'Doomsday' is sometimes used-- to mean, by extension, anything amazing, compelling, extremely powerful. (For 'Doomsday' examples, see {10,11}.)