— Divan-e-Ghalib, from the ghazal "ug raha hai dar-o-deewar se sabza"
About this quote
देवनागरी
उग रहा है दर-ओ-दीवार से सब्ज़ा ‘ग़ालिब’
हम बयाबाँ में हैं और घर में बहार आई है
English
Grass sprouts from my doors and walls, Ghalib — I wander the wilderness, while spring has come to my house.
What it means
Ruin rendered as irony: the abandoned house blooms precisely because its owner is gone. Ghalib looks at his own desolation and finds in it a bitter, perfect joke about absence and flourishing.
Everything turns on sabza. Green shooting from a garden bed is spring; the same green shooting from a doorframe and a wall is dilapidation — the image is of a building being taken back by the ground. Ghalib then names it bahaar anyway, and the joke lives entirely in that one borrowed word. Notice also the swap of places: he is in the bayaabaan while the wilderness has quietly moved into his house, so the two have traded natures rather than merely stood apart. It is often read as homesickness, a man missing his home in spring; but the house here is not waiting for him, it is dissolving, and the self-address Ghalib puts a smirk in the line rather than a sigh.
What it teaches you
When you hear that something you stepped away from is now thriving — a team, a house, a group of friends — separate the two kinds of growth before you feel anything. Some flourishing you would have been part of; some only began because the space you occupied opened up. Practically: the time to tend a place is while you are standing in it, because what fills your absence will not be an improvement you get to claim, and calling it spring does not make it yours.
अर्थ और सीख
घर वीरान है, दीवारों से घास उग आई है — मालिक जंगल में भटकता है और घर में ‘बहार’ आई है। बर्बादी पर ऐसा तंज़ ग़ालिब ही कर सकते हैं।
जिस जगह, रिश्ते या काम को आप छोड़ देते हैं, वह आपके इंतज़ार में रुका नहीं रहता — आपकी ग़ैर-हाज़िरी में भी वहाँ कुछ न कुछ उगता रहता है। इसलिए देखभाल तभी कीजिए जब तक आप वहाँ हैं, क्योंकि बाद में जो पनपेगा, उस पर आपका हक़ नहीं होगा।
Where it comes from
An authentic couplet from the Divan-e-Ghalib, the collected Urdu ghazals of Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1797–1869), from the ghazal beginning “ug raha hai dar-o-deewar se sabza”. Transliteration and English rendering are our own.
