FWP:
SETS
CHAK-E GAREBAN: {17,9}
CLOTHING/NAKEDNESS: {3,5}
MADNESS: {14,3}
ROAD: {10,12}
For background see S. R. Faruqi's choices.
I found this verse confusing, but I was able to get S. R. Faruqi's interpretation (Sept. 2008). He emphasizes the nature of the jaamah as an open, readily openable robe, lapped across the chest and held together only by small ties. Here's an example: *"Lala Bhagwandas, Perfume Merchant and Banker of Shahjahanabad," an opaque watercolor, Delhi, c.1820*, from the San Diego Museum of Art. The Lala is wearing an elegantly light jaamah :
By contrast, the qabaa is open and loose. In this painting from the Akbar-namah (*Routes*), one important courtier close to Akbar wears a dark blue qabaa , and another just behind him wears a dark red one:
In Faruqi's view, 'like the dust of the road' refers to life as something ubiquitous and amorphous and ungraspable, to the 'garment of existence' as something you can no more tie up and bind securely than you can so treat the 'dust of the road'. To turn the multiply-tied jaamah of existence into a loose, open qabaa of existence is to loosen one's grip on life, as a madman or wildly passionate lover would do.
And the most convenient way to do this is surely simply to rip the jaamah open, so that it hangs loose like a qabaa . Here there are of course overtones of the archetypal mad-lover act of chaak-e garebaa;N , the 'tearing of the collar'; for more on this, see {17,9}.
Another sense of qabaa karnaa , as Gyan Chand notes, is 'to cut, tear'. Here the idea would presumably be that the robe would be diced into pieces as small and futile as the grains of dust in the road.
Gyan Chand:
jaamah qabaa karnaa = to tear one's robe. How good that wildness/madness is, that when I would present the madness of oblivion-- that is, when I would become obliterated in madness and would turn my existence into fragments like dust. (258)