Safar Ko Sunna: Listening to the Road Before Naming the Destination

There is a habit most readers of poetry share, and I have it badly: we hurry to the meaning. We treat a couplet as a locked box and the ‘matlab’ as the key, and once we have the key we stop looking at the box. ‘Gard Ka Safar’ — the journey of dust — is a ghazal that punishes this habit gently, because its whole subject is the difference between arriving and travelling.

The opening couplet:

Tum jis ko manzil samajh kar thehre ho,
Hum uss safar ki gard ban kar aaye hain.

— Faizan Shaikh, Mohabbat wagaira.. (Gard Ka Safar, couplet 1)

You stopped at what you call a destination. We arrived as the dust of that journey. I hear two positions in the image: the person who has stopped and the speaker arriving as the road's residue. It might be tempting to treat the dust as the lesser thing. Read again with a different possibility: dust as a trace of movement. That interpretation does not have to win. It simply lets us examine what changes when we stop ranking the two images immediately.

I have been calling this week's theme ‘listening to the journey’, and this couplet is why. It asks you to attend to the part of an experience that does not get photographed — the moving part, the part that is over by the time you can describe it.

The second selected couplet gives one experience two names:

Tum jis ko mohabbat ka ek naam dete ho,
Hum uss khataa ki sazaa ab tak nibhaate aaye hain.

— Faizan Shaikh, Mohabbat wagaira.. (Gard Ka Safar, couplet 5)

What you call love, the speaker has been serving as the sentence for a mistake. The temptation is to hear this as bitterness. But listen to the verb. ‘Nibhaate’ is not the verb of collapse; it is the verb of carrying something through — a promise, a role, a duty. The speaker is still walking. Whatever the experience was, the journey has not stopped, and the couplet reports that fact without either pride or complaint.

One experience, two names, and the names are not reconciled. This is what the ghazal form does better than almost any other: it allows two truths to stand in two lines without a third line to arbitrate.

A small exercise

Here is a practice to try with a couplet you suspect you have understood too quickly.

First, read the couplet aloud at a normal pace and describe what you heard. Now put that explanation down. Read it again and attend to the phrases rather than trying to solve them: thehre ho at the end of the first line, then ban kar aaye hain at the end of the second. In the other selection, listen to nibhaate aaye hain. Notice where your breath wants to pause, and whether your delivery makes arrival or continuation clearer. Keep the words intact while you test the timing.

Finally, ask: what would this couplet lose if I only kept the meaning? In both cases the answer is the motion. The paraphrase of the first couplet — ‘I am the dust of your journey’ — is static. The couplet itself moves; it arrives in the second line. The paraphrase of the second — ‘you call it love, I call it punishment’ — is a quarrel. The couplet is not a quarrel; it is a person still walking.

The book contains its own notes on these lines, and they are the book's to give, not this essay's to summarise. What a reader can say is that ‘Gard Ka Safar’ rewards slowness. It is a poem about the part of the road nobody looks at, and it asks only that you look.

Which image draws your attention — the person who stopped, or the dust? The question can stay with the writing. You do not need to identify yourself with either image or turn the answer into a public account of your own journey.

If this reading stayed with you, the book is a Roman Urdu collection of twenty ghazals, each with a plain-language note and a short story. Details on the reading series are on the profile.

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