Momin Khan Momin

Momin Khan Momin (1800-1852) was a physician and astrologer in Delhi as well as a poet, and a contemporary of Ghalib and Zauq. He wrote a smaller body of work than either and is remembered chiefly for a handful of couplets of extraordinary compression — above all the one about being present in someone’s absence, which readers have been arguing over for two centuries. The story that Ghalib offered his entire divan in exchange for it is repeated everywhere and traced to no contemporary source.