Ranjish Hi Sahi — Ahmad Faraz

What Faraz is saying: Fine — let there be bitterness between us. Come at least to hurt my heart. Come again, just to leave me as you did before.

The speaker is not asking for love. He knows it is gone. He is asking for presence — even a painful presence — because even being hurt by the beloved is better than the numbness of complete absence. He would rather be abandoned again than feel nothing. The second line makes this explicit: he knows the pattern, he is not deluded, and yet he invites the cycle to repeat. Even the pain of being left is a form of contact.

What Faraz is saying: At least maintain the pretense — the bharam — of my love’s dignity. And you too, for once, come to make amends with me.

Pindar-e-mohabbat is the pride that belongs specifically to this love — the self-respect the speaker derives from having loved. He asks not for love itself but for its appearance, just enough for his dignity as a lover to survive. Then the quiet reversal: in Urdu poetry, it is always the devoted lover who must go and do the work of reconciliation. Faraz inverts this — he asks the beloved to do the running for once. “I have always come to you. Come to me. Just once.”

What Faraz is saying: Even if the old intimacy is gone — come at least to fulfill the social formalities.

Marasim is the deep, habitual familiarity between people who have shared their lives — not just affection, but the ease of long closeness. The speaker acknowledges it is gone. He does not ask for it back. Instead he descends to a lower floor: rasm-o-rah-e-duniya — the minimal courtesies that even strangers observe, a greeting, a visit, a message. He is no longer asking for love. He is asking for common decency. That this minimal request still carries an enormous unspoken love within it — that is the devastation of the couplet.

What Faraz is saying: How many people will I have to explain our separation to? If you are angry with me, come at least for the sake of appearances.

There is gentle irony here. The speaker uses social pressure as an argument — people will notice, people will ask. Then the turn: even the beloved’s own pride, her own image in the world’s eyes, should motivate her to come. “Your very anger is a reason to come — not coming makes the break too visible, too humiliating for both of us.” He will use any argument, however indirect, to get her to come. Under the wit, that need is enormous.

What Faraz is saying: For a lifetime I have been deprived even of the pleasure of weeping. O comfort of my soul — come to make me cry.

Lazzat-e-girya — the pleasure of weeping — is not a contradiction. Urdu poetry has always understood that the ability to cry is itself a form of relief, a sign that one can still feel. The speaker is not just sad; he is beyond sadness. He is numb. Grief has passed through its weeping phase and arrived somewhere frozen and dry, which is worse.

Then the address: rahat-e-jaan — comfort of my soul, ease of my life — one of the most tender epithets for the beloved in all of Urdu. And what does he ask this comfort to come and do? To cause him pain. The paradox is exact: the beloved’s presence, even a painful presence, would restore him to feeling. Her absence has taken away even the ability to grieve.

What Faraz is saying: Even now, this stubborn self-deceiving heart still holds hopes in you. Come — to extinguish even these last candles.

Dil-e-khush-fahm — the heart that persists in good opinion — is the speaker’s own heart, observed with gentle self-mockery. It is the heart that refuses to give up no matter how much evidence accumulates against hope. He does not condemn it; he watches it with rue and affection.

The sham’en — candles, lamps — are one of Urdu poetry’s most resonant symbols: hope, love, the light kept burning in darkness. These are the last ones. And rather than asking the beloved to spare them, or to kindle them further, he asks her to come and put them out herself. Why? Because at least that requires her presence. At least an extinguishing is an ending, a final contact, however painful. A candle that simply burns down alone in darkness is worse than one deliberately blown out by the person who lit it. In the extinguishing, there is still a meeting.

The ghazal’s full arc is now complete: from come to hurt me, through come to pretend, through come for society’s sake, through come for appearances, through come to make me feel, to come to destroy the last of what remains. Each couplet offers the beloved a lower and lower threshold to cross — not from weakness, but from the ruthless honesty of a love that has accepted everything except absence itself.