kabhi dariya nahin kafi kabhi qatra hai bahut
“Thirst, too, has so many stations — sometimes a whole river is not enough, sometimes a single drop is plenty.”
कभी दरिया नहीं काफ़ी कभी क़तरा है बहुत
The verse in Devanagari — it carries the authenticity of the original, and every Hindi reader can read it.
Thirst is given "stations", as a journey has stages, and the couplet maps two of them — the day a whole river cannot satisfy, and the day a single drop overflows. The pairing refuses any fixed measure of desire; longing, it suggests, is governed less by what is offered than by the state of the one who longs.
Your satisfaction depends less on the size of what you receive than on the condition of your wanting — tend to the thirst, not just the cup.
The heart of this site stays with Iqbal: explore his couplets → Or browse the whole Other Voices shelf →