Mujhse Pehli Si Mohabbat Mere Mehboob Na Maang — Faiz Ahmad Faiz

What Faiz is saying: I had believed — when you exist, life is luminous. When your grief is what I carry, what quarrel do I have with the world’s sorrow? Your face is what gives spring its permanence. Besides your eyes, what is there in the world worth keeping?

The verse reconstructs the earlier love — not to mock it but to honour what it was. The beloved was not merely beautiful but cosmologically necessary: her presence made life radiant, her face gave seasons their stability. Teri aankhon ke siva duniya mein rakha kya hai — besides your eyes, what is there in the world — is not a compliment. It is a description of how completely the lover had contracted the world to her. This is the love the poem is about to step away from, and it is shown in full before it is relinquished.

What Faiz is saying: If you were to be found, fate itself would bow down. It was not quite so — I had only wished it would be. There are other sorrows in the world besides love. There are other comforts besides the comfort of union.

The verse turns on a quiet self-correction. Yun na tha — it was not quite like that. The grandiose claim of the first verse — fate bowing down at union — is immediately walked back: that was a wish, not a fact. And then the great pivot of the poem: aur bhi dukh hain zamaane mein mohabbat ke siva. There are other sorrows. The world is not only the beloved and the lover. The line is simple in its words and enormous in its implication — the lover has stepped outside the closed universe of the earlier love and discovered that the rest of the world is real and full of suffering.

What Faiz is saying: The brutal, bestial enchantment of countless dark centuries — woven into silk and satin and brocade. Bodies being sold everywhere in lanes and marketplaces. Smeared in dust. Bathed in blood.

The verse opens the world that the earlier love had shut out. The tilism — the enchantment, the spell — is not of love but of centuries of oppression, dressed in luxury to disguise what it is. The three fabrics (reshm, atlas, kamkhwaab) are the clothing of the powerful; the bodies sold in the marketplace are what that luxury is built on. The dust and blood are not symbols. Faiz is describing what is actually happening in the streets, and the lover who once saw only the beloved’s face must now see this too.

What Faiz is saying: Bodies that have come out of the furnaces of disease. Pus flowing from burning, festering wounds. The eye turns back toward you — but how, how to live? Even now your beauty compels — but how to live?

This is the most physically brutal verse in the poem and one of the most shattering things Faiz ever wrote. The imagery is clinical and unflinching: not metaphorical suffering but actual diseased bodies, actual suppurating wounds. The lover’s eye, having seen this, turns back to the beloved — laut jaati hai udhar ko bhi nazar — because beauty still pulls, because the love has not died. But the question it asks is kya ki jiye — how to live, what is the use, how is life possible after seeing what the eye has seen. The beloved’s beauty is real. The world’s suffering is real. The lover stands between them, unable to unsee either.

The refrain returns, but changed. In Band 2 it read aur bhi dukh hain zamaane mein mohabbat ke siva — other sorrows in the world besides love. Here it is mohabbat ke dukh ke siva — other sorrows besides the sorrows of love itself. The substitution is exact and devastating: the poem has moved from “there are other things besides love” to “there are sorrows beyond even love’s own suffering.” The world’s pain is not merely additional to the lover’s pain — it is of a different order, beyond the register that love alone can contain.

And then the closing line, which is also the title, arrives not as a request but as an explanation of everything the poem has just shown: mujhse pehli si mohabbat mere mehboob na maang. Do not ask me for that earlier love. Not because it is gone. Because the man who felt it has looked at the world and cannot look away.