jab wo ajnabi ban kar yaas se guzarte hain
“My faith in love only grows the stronger — each time she, now turned a stranger, passes by wrapped in her own despair.”
जब वो अजनबी बन कर यास से गुज़रते हैं
The verse in Devanagari — it carries the authenticity of the original, and every Hindi reader can read it.
The paradox that closes the ghazal and answers its opening. Estrangement ought to kill one's faith in love; here it deepens it. Watching the beloved pass as a stranger — and seeing that she, too, carries despair — confirms to the lover that the wound is shared, that the love was real precisely because it costs both of them. The colder the proof, the firmer the belief. It rhymes straight back to the matla: 'our only crime is that we love them.'
Sometimes the evidence that a bond was real is the grief it leaves on both sides. An estrangement that still aches is not the absence of love — it is love's receipt.
The heart of this site stays with Iqbal: explore his couplets → Or browse the whole Other Voices shelf →