mu((aamilah : 'Dealing, transaction, negotiation, business, commerce, traffic; bargain, contract; correspondence; --sexual intercourse; --proceding, procedure; behavior; --affair, matter, concern'. (Platts p.1046)
inti;xaab : 'Extract; selection; election, choice'. (Platts p.86)
He says, why would my affair-- that is, the secret of my passion-- be open/apparent to anyone? But the selection of verses made me notorious-- that is, I always used to choose and recite/read verses that contained themes of affairs of passion and love. (216)
Alas, from the selection of verses the world learned that I am of a romantic temperament [((aashiq-mizaaj] or a lover of complexity/difficulty [diqqat-pasand]. It's clear that lovers of complexity are notorious among the common people. (289-90)
SETS == POETRY; WORDPLAY
The verse is crammed about as full of literary wordplay as it could possibly be. The words affair, selection, verses all have their own glossary entries. An additional pleasure is the presence in the first line of the verb 'to be open/apparent to someone' [kisii par khulnaa], which directly evokes the 'opening' and reading of a book-- say, an anthology or 'selection' of poetry. As for the 'affair' [mu((aamilah], it not only has wonderfully multifarious meanings from the commercial to the directly sexual, but strongly invokes the kind of ghazal called 'description of an affair'. Almost the same sense of 'opening' or 'public revelation' is in fact the literal meaning of rusvaa))ii ; for discussion, see {20,9}.
The first line is contrafactual, and suggests that the secret of the speaker's 'affair(s)' could have been kept if it were not for the anthology or 'selection' that gave the secret away. Was this because every verse he wrote-- and thus every verse in the anthology-- was one of obsessive passion, or some secret of the sort? Was this because when someone selected some of his verses for an anthology, the ones about obsessive passion at once stood out through their superior merit, and demanded to be chosen? Or, as Bekhud Dihlavi suggests, was this because he himself always chose and recited verses about obsessive passion at mushairahs?
What it really is, obviously, is a delightful virtuoso display of wordplay about words, of poetry about poetry, even of a perverse pride in one's (in)famous celebrity status.
Nazm:
Obviously the meaning is that people have realized that he is someone who is of a romantic temperament [((aashiq-mizaaj]. (161)
== Nazm page 161