Bhooli Bisri Chand Umeedein — Shahryar

The matla opens with *bhooli bisri* — a doubled phrase meaning thoroughly forgotten, the kind of forgetting that has settled in over time. A few hopes, a few stories, half-erased — and then you came to mind. And with you came not just a memory but entire eras. This is how memory actually works: one person unlocks a whole world. The radif *yaad aaye* (came to mind) will carry every sher, each one a different thing the act of remembering pulls up.

The city of the heart was green and flourishing — and yet dust kept drifting through it. Even in happiness, something was unsettled. Now the poet addresses the grief of love directly: *ae gham-e-jana* — O grief of the beloved. What times those were. And your pretexts, your occasions — the small reasons grief would arrive — those are what came to mind. Not grief itself, but the *excuses* grief used to appear: a particular light, a phrase, a season. Shahryar is precise about how loss works.

The ghazal shifts into a shared past — *we*, two people. They were afraid of those who laughed, and so they wept in secret. Two people drowned in deep thought together. *Do diwaane* — two mad ones — is both tender and precise: not individually mad but mad together, a specific pair. The sher remembers not a grand moment but a private habit — hiding from the world's cheer to cry. This is the intimacy that only shared experience creates, and Shahryar catches it in a single image.

The closing sher holds the ghazal's central paradox: cold gusts of wind that set fire and leave. New flowers blooming on the branches — and old pains remembered. This is the texture of grief that has aged: beauty arrives fresh, and instead of replacing the old pain it summons it. New flowers do not cancel old wounds; they bring them back. *Thandi sard* doubles the cold — a cold so cold it burns. Shahryar ends not with resolution but with the simple fact of how things are: the new and the old arrive together, and the old pains have their own insistence.