yaa;N falaa;xun-baaz kis kaa naalah-e be-baak hai
jaadah taa kuhsaar muu-e chiinii-e aflaak hai
1) here, whose shameless lament is a slingshot-wielder?
2) (from) the path/road to the mountain, is a hairline-crack in the porcelain of the heavens
falaa;xun : 'A sling (for stones)'. (Platts p.783)
chiinii : 'Of or belonging to China, produced in China, Chinese; ... china-ware, porcelain'. (Platts p.472
aflaak : 'The heavens, heavenly bodies; celestial orbs or spheres.
muu-e chiinii = In a porcelain vessel, the line of breaking. Far off, a mountain can be seen. On it a road climbs, and has been pushed through to the summit. From far off, it seems that the sky is a porcelain vessel in which, through this path/road up the mountain, a hairline crack has appeared. Whose lament threw a stone and made a hairline crack in the sky? Among falaa;xun [flings stones], kuhsaar [made of stone], chiinii [vulnerable to stone] there is wordplay.
For more on Ghalib's unpublished verses, see the discussion in {4,8x}. See also the overview index.
The remarkable word falaa;xun , 'slingshot', which doesn't appear in any divan verse. It surely deserves the credit of being a 'fresh word'.
We are in David and Goliath territory-- some poor desperate lover, 'shameless' because he's been driven beyond endurance, has flung or slung his lament like a stone, right up into the blank smooth indifferent heavens. But suddenly-- there seems to be a hairline crack! Actually the effect only runs up through the road as high as the mountaintop, it doesn't really split the heavens. But still-- if you squint just a bit, it looks as if that hairline crack might indeed continue right up into the rigid but delicate porcelain bowl of the heavens. Zamin faults the verse for not making the crack continue all the way, but Ghalib has left room for some (very human) wishful thinking.
Compare the hairline crack that is opened up in a wineglass, to turn it into a whetstone, in {25,11x}. And compare the way a jaadah is made to resemble a thread or string, in {10,12}.
Zamin:
That is from the stone-throwing of the shameless lament, a hairline crack has come into the porcelain of the sky. This is that same 'hair' that can be seen in the form of the path/road as far as the mountains. But if the 'hair' in the porcelain of the sky had been made into a path/road not to the mountains but to the constellations, then it wouldn't have been necessary to bring the earth and sky together with a hinge.
== Zamin, p. 436