pinhaa;N thaa daam sa;xt qariib aashiyaan
ke
u;Rne nah paa))e the kih giriftaar ham hu))e
1) the net was hidden 'hard by' the nest
2) we had not managed to fly-- {when / in that} we became trapped/captured
sa;xt : 'Hard, stiff, rigid, firm, fast; strong, solid; tight;... wretched; difficult, arduous, troublesome; painful, grievous; severe, intense, vehement, violent;... austere, stern, harsh; very cruel, fell; --adv. Very, intensely, violently, severely, excessively extremely, &c.'. (Platts p.644)
giriftaar : 'Taken, seized, arrested, captured; involved (in), entangled; liable; stricken, smitten (with love, &c.), captivated; —one who is taken, &c.; a captive, a prisoner'. (Platts p.904)
The net was spread very near the nest. He had only just formed the intention of flying, when the next thing he knew he was trapped in the net. (325)
Here Ghalib focuses the whole verse on an idiom that's not even really an Urdu idiom, but a Persian one. It's easy to see why he dragged it bodily into Urdu-- because it was just what he wanted, it was just the thing to give a small, hot, deep, painful center to the whole verse. The verse is otherwise a brief, plain, factual narrative, a story told in simple language as economically as possible. But then, in the midst of it, this one word-- just look at its multiply appropriate meanings!-- compresses within itself a world of sorrow, pain, complaint, indignation.
A literal translation would have to be something like 'harshly near', but of course that loses the idiomatic effect entirely. So in order to convey the effect, I've resorted to an archaism: 'hard by' (meaning 'very near') isn't used any longer in English, but it's perfectly familiar to readers of medieval romances. And it has some of the same double sense, though its range of relevant meaning isn't nearly as rich.
That one word, sa;xt , forms a pivot around which the whole verse turns. For another exploration of its multivalence, see {183,6}.
This is one of those verses in which the lover speaks as a bird; for others, see {126,5}.
Hali:
The meaning he has presented in that way is this: that even before he reached maturity he was surrounded by difficulties and tribulations.
==Urdu text: p. 129 in Hali, Yadgar-e Ghalib