Jo Hua, Aur Jo Chaaha Gaya: ‘Haqeeqat Aur Hasrat’ as a Ledger with Two Columns

Imagine a ledger with two columns. In the left, what happened; in the right, what was hoped for. For this reading of ‘Haqeeqat Aur Hasrat’, the useful question is not which column a real reader ought to prefer. It is how the speaker assigns the words zaroorat and mohabbat. Keep the ledger as a way into the poem, not a test of your personal history.

Haqeeqat jo bani — woh zaroorat likhi gayi,
Jo hasrat hi rahi — woh mohabbat likhi gayi.

— Faizan Shaikh, Mohabbat wagaira.. (Haqeeqat Aur Hasrat, couplet 1)

What became real was recorded as need. What stayed a longing was recorded as love. One possible reading hears a bitter verdict: love is only what is denied. Another reading can begin with a single phrase, likhi gayi — it was written. Not simply “it is” or “it was”: it was recorded. By whom? The couplet does not specify. That absence leaves room to consider the act of naming without pretending to know who kept this imagined ledger.

That changes the couplet from a verdict into a description of a filing system. And a filing system can be reopened.

The third couplet extends the ledger to the road we walked last week:

Manzil par pahunche toh bas ek ghar mila,
Safar mein jo rahi — wohi jannat likhi gayi.

— Faizan Shaikh, Mohabbat wagaira.. (Haqeeqat Aur Hasrat, couplet 3)

At the destination there was only a house. What stayed in the journey was recorded as paradise. Again the verb: recorded. And again the ghazal refuses to mock either column. The house is a house; it is not nothing. The journey was a journey; it did not pretend to be a place to live. ‘Jannat’ was assigned to one of them afterwards, by the same hand that assigned ‘zaroorat’ and ‘mohabbat’ in the first couplet.

I want to be careful here, because the easy modern reading of this ghazal is a scolding — be grateful for what you have, stop romanticising what you lost. The ghazal does not scold. It observes. It observes so precisely that the observation becomes uncomfortable, which is a different thing from being told off. Nobody likes to see their own handwriting in a ledger they did not know they were keeping.

Can the file be reopened?

This is a question to keep within the reading rather than resolve too quickly. The couplets make an act of labeling visible. Once need is heard as a word entered in a record, a reader can ask what another description would change. Would the line become kinder, less precise, or merely different? There is no need to turn that exercise into a rule for renaming real relationships. It is enough to notice the words the fictional account has chosen.

I do not think the speaker of this ghazal reopens his ledger. The chapter's closing couplet suggests he knows the habit and keeps it anyway, and there is a dignity in that honesty which I would not take from him. But a reader is not the speaker. A reader can close the book and go and look at the left column.

Across these four themes, different questions sit beside each other: what an unfinished letter holds, how a fictional voice should be heard, what remains of a journey, and how an experience is named. This final ledger image offers one way to bring those questions together. It does not prove that the author planned the same connection. A reading series can propose a pattern while leaving room for another reader to arrange the selections differently.

Which column is your love in? And who wrote the label?

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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