Mohabbat Karne Wale Kam Na Honge — Hafeez Hoshiarpuri

What Hafiz is saying: Those who love you will not be few. But I will not be among them in your gathering.

The matla sets the emotional terms with exact economy. The speaker does not claim to be the only one who loves — he concedes the opposite: lovers will be plentiful. His distinction is not his uniqueness but his absence. The gathering will go on, the beloved will have company, and precisely because all this will continue without him, the statement carries its full weight. He is not predicting the end of love or the end of the gathering. He is predicting only his own exclusion from it.

What Hafiz is saying: I often wonder — how long will flowers go on sharing in the weeping of the dew?

Sharik-e-girya-e-shabnam — sharing in the weeping of the dew — is a triple izafat construction of unusual compression. The dew on a flower is recast as the flower weeping, or as the dew weeping onto the flower, or as both weeping together. The question kab tak — “until when, how long” — asks whether this participation in grief has a term. It does not answer. The speaker often wonders this. The flower and the dew are a natural image for the self and the tears it carries: how long can something beautiful sustain that kind of grief before the partnership ends?

What Hafiz is saying: The eye of grace is a little slow to arrive — but cruelty alone will not be unceasing in love.

Chashm-e-karam — the eye of grace — is the beloved’s glance turned merciful, the look that relents. The speaker acknowledges it is der-ashna, slow to acquaint itself with him, late in arriving. But then the counter: sitam hi paiham na honge — cruelty will not be the only constant either. Cruelty and grace are both temporary. The couplet holds an argument against despair: neither the torment nor its absence is permanent. The eye of mercy is slow but not absent. This is one of the few couplets in the ghazal that leans toward consolation rather than loss.

What Hafiz is saying: The tangles of hearts will keep growing if there is no counsel exchanged between us.

Baham — together, mutually — is the key word: the consultation must be two-sided. Mashware is not a monologue of grievance but a genuine exchange. The couplet moves from the personal to something almost practical: entanglements of the heart compound when there is no conversation. The speaker is not asking for love returned or pain acknowledged — he is asking, quietly, for the two of them to talk. Among all the ghazal’s requests, this may be the most human.

What Hafiz is saying: All the world’s griefs, or the single grief of you — if this grief is here, how many other griefs simply cease to exist?

This is the ghazal’s most daring couplet. The single grief of the beloved’s absence is so total that it displaces all other grief. Not that other sorrows become smaller — they become absent. A grief large enough crowds out the entire field. The word gham appears four times in two lines, each time doing slightly different work: the world’s griefs (plural, diffuse), your grief (singular, focused), this grief (the specific weight of it), and then the griefs that vanish in its presence. The couplet works as argument and also as something felt — anyone who has known an all-consuming loss recognises that the ordinary small sorrows of life simply stop registering.

What Hafiz is saying: Why should I call the people of the world heartless? They are simply not privy to my condition.

Mahram carries precise weight: not merely “aware” but intimately aware, the way one is aware of what is kept inside. The speaker defends the world against his own potential bitterness. The world is not cruel — it simply does not know. And how could it? His inner state is not visible. The couplet is an act of unusual generosity: releasing the world from blame by recognising that the withholding of sympathy and the absence of understanding are not the same thing as indifference.

What Hafiz is saying: There will be a flood of weeping in the heart if we are not there with eyes brimming with tears.

The logic inverts the expected direction: the sail-e-girya — the flood, the torrent of grief — builds inside the heart when the tears do not come outside. Weeping is relief. Eyes that fill and overflow are the release valve. Without them — without ba-dida-e-pur-nam, the condition of being present with brimming eyes — the interior flood has nowhere to go and keeps rising. The couplet names something true about grief: that not being able to cry is worse than crying, that the body’s refusal to weep is its own form of drowning.

What Hafiz is saying: Even if you were to meet me by chance, the wounds of separation from you would not be fewer.

This is among the ghazal’s most precise observations about the psychology of loss. Ittifaqan — by chance, accidentally — signals that even the meeting being imagined is not a reunion sought or granted but a random collision. And even that does not heal. Furqat ke sadme — the wounds of separation — are not undone by a chance encounter. They have their own accumulated weight that a momentary meeting cannot reduce. The couplet refuses the consolation that even seeing the beloved would help. Some damage does not respond to contact.

What Hafiz is saying: Hafiz — however ill-disposed in my thoughts I am about them, they will not be that disturbed about me.

The maqta closes the ghazal with painful asymmetry. Bad-guman — harbouring ill thoughts, being suspicious, allowing dark assumptions about the other — the speaker confesses to this about the beloved. He thinks ill of them. He doubts them. And then the final turn: they will not be barham — upset, disturbed, thrown into disarray — about him to anywhere near the same degree. His disturbance is large; their disturbance about him is small. His preoccupation with them is not matched. The ghazal that opened with “lovers of yours will not be few, but I will not be among them” ends here: not only is he absent from the gathering, but the intensity of his feeling for them has no corresponding intensity in the other direction.

The pen name ‘Hafiz’ used here belongs to Hafeez Hoshiarpuri (1912–1994), a Punjabi-born Urdu poet whose ghazals were set to music by many of the great classical vocalists of his era. He is distinct from Hafiz Jalandhari, who also used a similar pen name — the shared hafeez/hafiz has caused attribution confusion across many printed editions.