To accept the state of non-activity in the garden is also being part of it; If you are the lowly dust, use the footprints on it To make a bouquet

Bekari stands for inactivity, idleness; chaman for garden; guldastah for bouquet; naqsh-e qadam for footprint; naqsh for colouring, drawing, design, delineation, engraving, so on. This she’r reminds me of the last line in Milton’s famous sonnet: “They also serve who only stand and wait”.

I chose this she’r because it appears obscure on first reading. The first misra, especially, demands an imaginative, rather than a prosaic, pragmatic approach that Gyan Chand Jain has adopted in his commentary. According to Jain, one could spend life busy in pursuit of goals or simply accept what one has and be content. A person who has nothing but dust (khak) can make drawings on dust in myriad ways and make a bouquet.

But by emphasising the literal meaning of bekari (inactivity) another aspect of the generic mazmun of contentment is created. We can explore a new direction of meaning.

I think that an interesting idea is created by thinking of a garden as a beautiful place in any colour. The people who walk in the garden leave footprints. The footprints follow each other in a straight line. There are many footprints. If all are joined together, a bouquet, or many bouquets, can be imagined to be there. Thus even the garden’s dust can be fashioned into a bouquet of footprints. But the question is: how can footprints make a bouquet, let alone a hundred of them? The answer to this has been left for us to provide. And the answer is that the beloved’s footprints are beautiful like flowers. This mazmun is often encountered in Indo-Persian poets, notably Bedil and Nemat Khan-e Aali. But Ghalib himself provides an instant clue:

The writer teaches in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia. She is currently writing a commentary on the mustarad kalam of Ghalib.