It begins with rain, as all true things in Delhi do. Not the slapdash splash of summer showers but the slow, smoky kind — rain that rests heavy on windowpanes and breathes into the bricks of old buildings, rain that remembers, rain that rewinds. The kind of rain that soaks not just your socks, but your certainty. And every time it comes, it brings with it a voice — my mother’s — not loud, not polished, but precise in its purpose, humming a ghazal older than both of us, older perhaps than pain itself.
“ye na thi hamārī qismat ki visāl-e-yār hotā / agar aur jīte rahte yahī intizār hotā.”
It wasn’t in my fate to be united with my beloved; had I lived longer, I’d only have lived longer in longing. She sang it not as a performer, not for applause, but like someone breathing into bruises. I must have been ten, maybe eleven, when I first heard her hum it while folding saris, slicing onions, or just sitting silently in the semi-light of late afternoon, a woman lit from within by the glow of old Urdu.
I didn’t understand the words then, but I understood something was being said that silence couldn’t carry alone.
And then, I did understand.
Fourteen, feverish with first love, first hunger, first heartbreak, that year when adolescence feels like a foghorn no one else can hear. He and I — we sat side by side in coaching classes, trading notes and knowing nods, letting fingers flirt across shared textbooks and time. We weren’t lovers yet, just two teenagers teetering on the edge of tenderness, balanced between black ink and blue sky. He never said he loved me. He didn’t need to. He showed up. Until he didn’t.
It was the day of the exam. The sky was swollen with clouds, the air thick with the scent of sopped soil, and my heart a hummingbird hammering against my ribs. I boarded the bus alone, a single seat beside me screaming louder than thunder, and I waited. I waited through every bump and every bend, every stop and start of the bus as it lunged towards the school gates. But he wasn’t there. Not in the bus, not in the classroom, not in the corridors. Just an absence so loud it echoed. I wrote the exam with my pen in one hand and a prayer in the other. He never arrived. No call. No message. No explanation. Just evaporation.
And I? I broke quietly, beautifully, like a mirror that only cracked along the edges.
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“tire va.ade par jiye ham to ye jaan jhūṭ jānā / ki ḳhushī se mar na jaate agar e‘itibār hotā.”
I lived on your promises, knowing they were lies. If I’d truly believed you, I might have died of joy. But I didn’t die. I just rode the bus home, face pressed to the glass, watching raindrops race like ruined hopes down scratched windows, wondering what I had done to deserve a silence that sharp. I didn’t tell anyone. Not even my mother. But she knew. She always did. That evening, without asking, she made my favourite donuts and began to hum again. Same ghazal, same weight, same wisdom.
“tirī nāzukī se jaanā ki bāñdhā thā ahd bodā / kabhī tū na toṛ saktā agar ustuvār hotā.”
Your delicacy revealed the weakness of your promise; you wouldn’t have broken it if it had been strong. I didn’t cry. Not then. I let the ghazal cry for me.
But songs, like sorrow, spread.
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I heard it again weeks later — this time not from my mother but from a friend’s stereo, spinning in a South Delhi living room where the curtains smelled of sandalwood and her father sat cross-legged on the floor sipping whisky and speaking of Ghalib as if he knew him. That was the first time I heard it properly, with the pain performed, not just passed down. Ghulam Ali’s voice carried it like confession, like consequence. The words hit different now — they hit like truth. They hit like thunder under your ribs.
“koī mere dil se pūchhe tire t̤īr-e-nīm-kash ko / ye ḳhalish kahāñ se hotī jo jigar ke paar hotā.”
Ask my heart about your half-drawn arrow — this ache wouldn’t remain if it had gone all the way through. That night, I walked home through water and memory, repeating the lines like a spell, like a string of prayer beads for the broken-hearted.
The years rolled on like film reels — fast, flickering, full of characters who looked like love but left like ghosts. I fell again, failed again, stood again. I found lovers who stayed the night but not the morning, love letters that said everything except stay. But every time, in the ruins of another almost, I returned to the rain. To the song. To the bus window where I first learned how absence feels like a hand you can’t hold anymore.
“ye kahāñ kī dostī hai ki bane haiñ dost nāseh / koī chārasāz hotā koī ġham-gusār hotā.”
What kind of friendship is this where friends turn into preachers? If only someone healed. If only someone mourned with me. And yet — somehow, I began to heal. Not through grand gestures or movie-magic reunions, but in the little rituals. In lighting agarbattis at dusk. In rereading the same couplets on rainy nights. In singing the song myself, first quietly, then boldly, in my own crooked, cracking voice.
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Grief, I learned, is not a stop. It is a sound. A scent. A season. And every time Delhi rumbles awake with rain, I step back into that one night of my life that loops like a lullaby — the boy who didn’t come, the exam I still passed, the silence I learned to survive.
“ġham agarche jāñ-gusil hai pa kahāñ bacheñ ki dil hai / ġham-e-ishq gar na hotā ġham-e-rozgār hotā.”
Though grief is soul-slaying, the heart is no child’s toy. If it hadn’t been the pain of love, it would’ve been the pain of living. I kept living. I kept loving. And one day, years later, walking down a monsoon-drenched market road, I saw him. Just like that. Older. Broader. A small child tugging at his sleeve. He looked at me. I looked at him. And the world didn’t stop. It simply nodded.
There was no drama. No apology. No song swelling in the background. But that night, I went home, and for the first time, I laughed while singing the ghazal.
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“kahūñ kis se maiñ ki kyā hai shab-e-ġham burī balā hai / mujhe kyā burā thā marna agar ek bār hotā.”
Who do I tell how terrible the night of sorrow is? I wouldn’t have minded dying — if it happened just once. But we don’t die once. We die many small deaths. And somehow, between them, we live.
Now, when my mother hums the ghazal — still folding clothes, still quietly carrying a century in her sigh — I hum with her. We don’t talk about heartbreak. We don’t need to. The rain does it for us.
“ye masā.il-e-tasavvuf ye tirā bayān ‘ġhālib’ / tujhe ham valī samajhte jo na bāda-khvār hotā.”
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These riddles of the mystics, this eloquence of yours, Ghalib — we’d call you a saint, if you hadn’t been a drinker.
But I think it’s the drinking — from love, from loss, from longing — that made him holy.
And maybe that’s all we are. Drinkers of memory. Singers of silence. Survivors of stories that never end — just begin again every time it rains.
