jis bazm me;N tuu naaz se guftaar
me;N aave
jaa;N kaalbud-e .suurat-e diivaar me;N aave
1) in the gathering in which you, out of coquetry, would enter
into conversation
2) life would enter into the frame/figure/model of the face/aspect of the
wall
aave is an archaic form of aa))e (GRAMMAR)
kaalbud : 'The body (of a man or animal); the frame; the heart; --figure, form, mold, model'. (Platts p.803)
He says, the gathering in which you converse with airs and graces-- the pictures that hang on the walls of that house come to life. (249)
Having seen in himself the life-giving power of the beloved's words, the lover says, if you would begin to converse coquettishly in a gathering, then life would enter into the pictures painted on the wall. (337)
Ghalib originally composed a ghazal of eleven verses (); he chose to include all eleven verses (Hamid p. 141) in his published divan. More on this topic: S. R. Faruqi's choices.
The commentators give us a meaning that can be put into a prose paraphrase without any real loss. You'd think that little alarm bells would begin going off in their heads-- uh oh, what is going on in this verse that I'm missing? Why would anyone say 'vah vah!' on hearing this verse? It seems to have no kick, no punch! Then you'd think that they'd scrutinize the verse with extra care, especially the second line, which is obviously where the action has to be (it has all the i.zaafat forms and other complexities). As soon as they did so, the delightful doubleness of the second line would hit them. For whatever reasons, they didn't do so, but that certainly won't stop us from widening and deepening the verse for ourselves.
Anyway, on the first reading I didn't 'get' this verse either, so I did just what I recommended, dear reader. The alarm bells sounded, and I zeroed in on that second line, and really, it isn't rocket science. Once we start playing around with it and pushing it here and there, the second line clearly has two possible readings. The first is the one everyone spells out: that life would enter into the 'face' or aspect of the very wall. But then-- that meaning hardly requires kaalbud . What other possibilities does kaalbud open up? Since it can mean 'model', right there we've got it. One's life would assume the form of, would take as a model or pattern, the wall. In other words, the listeners would be petrified, dazed, entranced by her dazzling conversation. They'd be frozen in place, as immobile as a wall; probably their love-crazed faces would be pale and blank, like a whitewashed wall, too. Needless to say, there's plenty of precedent for such a reaction: just consider {116,8}, in which the pattern for human behavior in the beloved's street is the prostrate, open-mouthed 'stupefaction of a footprint'.
So: the wall comes alive, and/or the people are petrified into walls. Life and death bounce back and forth, when the beloved is around. Really, aren't two meanings more than twice as enjoyable as one? The moral is (since I'm being teacherly) that you can do this sort of thing yourself, even if you don't know Urdu perfectly. Just keep poking and prodding each word and phrase, looking for alternatives, and don't be satisfied until you get a real 'zing' of some kind. This is Ghalib, after all. He was a genius poet in this genre, and he knew it. His verses are twisty rivers full of rapids and whirlpools, not prosy shipping canals that convey a single fixed load of meaning from point A to point B. Sorry for this rant; once in a while I need to sound off.
Nazm:
The theme is very famous among the poets, that in the beloved's lip and mouth is the quality of life-bestowingness. For this reason, if through her conversation life would enter into the face/aspect of the wall, it wouldn't be strange. guftaar me;N aanaa with the meaning of 'to converse' is not the idiom of Urdu, it's a translation [from Persian]. (193)
== Nazm page 193