samajh ke karte hai;N baazaar me;N
vuh pursish-e ;haal
kih yih kahe kih sar-e rahguzar hai kyaa kahiye
1) she deliberately asks about his situation, in the
bazaar, in such a way
2) so that he/one would say this: that 'this is the roadside, what can you
say?'
He says, that coquettish one considers that 'Mirza Sahib, because of his dignity [va.z((a-daarii], will be embarrassed to speak to me on the street, and in reply will say that this is not the occasion for conversation.' (283)
In his heart he is telling to some confidant, the state of the beloved's trickery/deceit [((ayyaarii]. (394)
SETS == IDIOMS; INEXPRESSIBILITY; KIH
This is a good chance to continue our discussion of the complexities of kih . In the previous verse, {201,4}, we saw that one of its meanings was as a very flexible form of quote-marker (as is the case in the second instance here). But in the present verse the first instance of kih has to mean something like 'so that, in order that'. (This is a logical reversal of the 'since, because' sense in the previous verse.) How do we know which way kih goes in any one case? Sometimes through grammar: in the present verse, the subjunctive kahe is a good clue, while in the previous verse the indicative hai is another. But in other cases, the meaning could genuinely go either way, and has to be puzzled out through sheer semantic context; which makes it a great tool for a brilliantly sadistic word-gamer like Ghalib.
Here the beloved torments the lover with a show of sympathy-- but a cleverly impossible one. She makes him an offer he can't accept. She asks how he is, right in public, in the marketplace. She knows perfectly well he'll have to say, 'we're out here in the street, how can I tell you anything?' Once again kyaa kahiye works both as a rhetorical part of his expostulation, and as an exclamation of shock and idiomaic indescribability (the inexpressibility trope).
Such a beloved deserves a lover like the Other in {191,4}.
There's also a nice wordplay between 'that' [vuh] in the first line and 'this' [yih] in the second. The colloquial flavor of vuh in the first line is hard to translate-- when she 'does that situation-inquiry', the 'that' really, idiomatically, means 'such'. The yih in the second line is straightforward, but can mean either 'he ('this one') would say', or 'he (subject omitted) would say this'. However it doesn't make much difference either way in this case.
On samajhnaa as 'to consider', see {90,3}.
Nazm:
The excellence of this verse is that it bears witness to the beloved's being tricky/devious [((ayyaar] and mischievous in her temperament. (225)