— Divan-e-Ghalib, from the ghazal "rahiye ab aisi jagah"
About this quote
देवनागरी
रहिए अब ऐसी जगह चल कर जहाँ कोई न हो
हम-सुख़न कोई न हो और हम-ज़बाँ कोई न हो
English
Let me now go and live where no one is — no one to talk with, no one who speaks my tongue.
What it means
The fantasy of total withdrawal, spoken by the most social poet of his age — which is exactly why it rings true. Everyone exhausted by the world has rented, briefly, Ghalib’s imaginary house.
The wish arrives in three stages, each narrower than the last: no one at all, then no one to converse with, then no one who shares his tongue. That is not one desire repeated for the metre — it is a man refining what he actually cannot bear, and he ends on being spoken to in a language he understands, which is the only one of the three that can misunderstand him. The give-away is rahiye: a formal, courteous imperative, the aap one uses with a stranger. He is already addressing himself as though from a distance, which is the loneliness the couplet claims to be looking for. Chal kar adds that he will have to walk there — the escape has a cost built into it.
What it teaches you
Next time you want everyone to go away, work out which of the three you mean: fewer people around you, less obligation to talk, or an end to being understood wrongly. They have different remedies. The first two are solved by shutting the door for an evening. The third is not solved by solitude at all — it needs one person who reads you accurately, and removing everybody guarantees you never find them. Say which one it is before you start cancelling things.
अर्थ और सीख
अब ऐसी जगह चलें जहाँ कोई न हो — न कोई बात करने वाला, न कोई ज़बान समझने वाला। दुनिया से थके हर दिल की ख़्वाहिश।
तन्हाई की ख़्वाहिश हो तो पहले तय कीजिए कि आप कम लोग चाहते हैं, कम बातचीत, या यह कि कोई आपको ग़लत न समझे। पहली दो चीज़ें दरवाज़ा बंद करने से हल हो जाती हैं, तीसरी सिर्फ़ एक ठीक से समझने वाले इंसान से हल होती है — और सबको हटा देने पर वह इंसान कभी मिलेगा ही नहीं।
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 “rahiye ab aisi jagah”. Transliteration and English rendering are our own.
