parvaaz'haa niyaaz-e tamaashaa-e ;husn-e dost
baal-e kushaadah hai nigah-e aashnaa mujhe
1) flights-- a prayer/longing/need/offering/gift of the spectacle/show of the beauty of the beloved
2) an opened/spread wing is a gaze of {familiarity / a familiar}, to me
3) a gaze of {familiarity / a familiar} is an opened/spread wing, to me
niyaaz : 'Petition, supplication, prayer; —inclination, wish, eager desire, longing; need, necessity; indigence, poverty; —a gift, present; —an offering, a thing dedicated; —assignment of revenue for the relief of the indigent'. (Platts p.1164)
kushaadah : 'Opened, uncovered, disclosed, discovered, detected, revealed, expanded, spread out, displayed, drawn forth;... free, frank, cheerful, glad, happy; serene, clear'. (Platts p.835)
aashnaa : 'Aquaintance; friend; associate; intimate friend, familiar; lover, sweetheart; paramour; mistress, concubine; —adj. Acquainted (with, - se ), knowing, known; attached (to), fond (of)'. (Platts p.57)
SETS == TRANSITIVITY
GAZE: {10,12}
TAMASHA: {8,1}
Raza p. 167. S. R. Faruqi's choices. Ghalib originally composed a ghazal of thirteen verses, from which he chose five for publication in his divan. In the original thirteen-verse ghazal, this verse was the eighth one.
Look at the wonderfully apposite (and opposite) meanings of niyaaz . Those 'flights' can be any of the following:
=a 'petition, prayer' offered by the lover (he begs the beloved to display her beauty, and send his imagination soaring)
=a 'longing, need' felt by the lover (he yearns for the elevating, transporting sight of her beauty)
=a 'gift, present' (the beloved's beauty bestows its favor upon the devoted lover, in the form of flights of the imagination)
=an 'offering' or 'thing dedicated' (the lover consecrates his fullest imaginative powers to the service of her beauty)
In the second line, 'A is B' generates 'B is A' as well, and the clever use of aashnaa , which can be both a noun and an adjective (see the definition above), ensures that a suitable level of undecideability will be maintained. So perhaps the lover is actually watching birds in flight, and seeing them as a token or gift of the beauty of the (Divine?) beloved, so that their opened wings seem to convey to him the gaze of affectionate eyes (2a). Or perhaps when he receives a familiar or warm gaze from the beautiful beloved, it acts as an opened wing, and bestows on him soaring flights of the imagination (2b).
The primary meaning of kushaadah is of course 'opened' (like a wing), but the wordplay of its secondary meaning of 'cheerful' or 'happy' also works beautifully here with the idea of the a 'familiar' or friendly or affectionate gaze (or the gaze of such a person). The idiom aa;Nkhe;N bichhaanaa , literally 'to spread the eyes', has the sense of 'to welcome warmly'. And in this verse, surely not coincidentally, the beloved is the dost , or 'friend'.
Compare {58,1}, another meditation on the winged flight of the imagination.
Gyan Chand:
Birds are flying in the air. To me it seems that all these flights are for the purpose of seeing the beauty of the beloved. To me these birds' opened wings seem like the gaze of some familiar person, because these birds and I have the same single purpose. (337)