On an unseasonably cold November night in 2022, a pain, a dull burn, gripped my chest in what felt like a constriction, an uneasy tightness or pressure, a sort of squeeze or clutch around my sternum.

Then it spread like thick fog, intense but not sharp. There was a feeling of heaviness in the centre of my chest. Then it crawled to a spot between my shoulder blades right behind my neck. My jaw began to ache. Every tooth in my right jaw felt loose. Was the pain in my jaw or in my chest? No, there was a path of dull, grinding pain between my jaw and chest. It worsened if I lay down.

I sat through the night massaging my heart not sure what exactly was wrong. A little voice said: could this be a heart attack? But I crushed the voice. In the morning, I felt better, only because the dull squeezing pain was gone. The clutch had loosened its grip. The knot was undone. I felt lightheaded, drained of energy, but determined to carry on with the day’s work. Looking back, I can discern desperation in my actions. I wanted to brush aside the night’s pain like a bad dream.

But my story didn’t end there. Each time I walked briskly, I would experience pain in my chest. Lightheaded and unsteady on my feet, I teetered between belief and disbelief at my condition. I found it hard to believe that I had been diagnosed with “coronary heart disease”, or that I had become, as we referred to such sufferers back home, a “heart patient.”

Once I knew what angina felt like, I seemed to experience it at the most delicate slight, at the smallest hurt. Simply talking about my heart attack produced a tightening in my chest; a constriction that sparked a response in my jaw, that made me aware of my heart and sternum. The constrictions came and went, like a fist that tightly shut, then released.

I was told I needed an angiogram.

Constriction is a multivalent word. It holds within its depths a slew of emotions. Constriction is like a tight knot of feelings inside your chest’s cavity, or a narrowing, squeezing sensation in your arteries that signals a warning — a red flag that you must see — stop or suffer.

Did I believe that the heart, and not the mind, is the centre of emotions? Perhaps not. What makes the heart race, what makes it sink? Desire and dread. In the mystic analogy that M.H. Askari points to in his essays, the heart and the mind can together be a single unit: qalb. I liked to experience desire and dread. My recourse is Ghalib:

Gar yaas sar na kheenchay tangi ajab fiza hai
Wus‘at gah-i-tamanna yak baam-o-sad hawa hai

[If despondency shouldn’t arise, stricture has a wonderful ambience/ The vastness of desire is like a hundred breezes that blow across a single terrace.]

Ghalib has a wonderful play on constriction or tangi in this masterful verse, one that he chose not to publish. In his poetry, Ghalib favours the word ‘tangi’ because of its multivalence. Here, it implies both scarcity and narrowness. The phrase ‘ajab fiza’ that follows it adds a sense of mystery, playing with both meanings of tangi.

In a ghazal, the second line of a sher, or couplet, responds to the first and, here, the poet uses the form to present a sophisticated argument. Desire is boundless, even if the protagonist is confined or restrained in a narrow space or circumstance. The contrastive agreement between yak [one] and sad [hundred] and between tangi [narrowness] and wus‘at [spaciousness] creates a wonderful ambience, ajab fiza.

Yak baam and sad hawa are joined with a vao, but it is not a simple vao-i-‘atf. Vao, a vital letter of the Perso-Urdu alphabet, serves multiple functions. It is most often used as a conjunction — “and” — but it can also be used as a comparative “tashbeehi”. In Ghalib’s verse, it is, in fact, vao-i-tashbeehi. That is, it creates two situations: yak baam [one terrace] is equivalent to a hundred breezes. And yak baam is the same as a hundred breezes. The nuance is delicate, but that is Ghalib for you.

A new idea is broached in this line by the suggestion that disappointment can curb or sour the imaginings of desire. Yaas is a situation when one gives up hoping, certain that the desired objective will never be achieved. Tamanna, on the other hand, has possibilities of realisation. The word hawa becomes most interesting in the context of tamanna. If we read it to mean ‘desire’, then the narrator seems to tell us that a hundred or myriad desires can be generated or made active by just observing from a terrace.

I’ve been carried away by Ghalib’s clever deployment of tangi but, before I move on, I must share another of his verses on constriction:

Tangi-i-dil ka gila kya yeh woh kafir dil hai
Ke agar tang na hota tau pareshaañ hota

[No use complaining of this sinner heart’s narrowness/ If it weren’t [so] constricted, it would be restless]

Ghalib offers a scintillating play on tangi and pareshaani in this couplet. The heart is deemed to be restless. Thankfully, the heart’s constriction sets a limit on its restlessness.

The nurse had asked me to pack an overnight bag. “Bring a book to read,” she said on the phone. Her words struck me as charming, oddly comforting. I pondered over her words, captivated. Did she not believe that a cell phone was enough entertainment to while away time? Or even an iPad, even if I didn’t own one. A book? I live surrounded by books. Which book could be the one book to bring along to a hospital where my wounded heart would, itself, become the subject of investigation?

I shoved my elegant, slender copy of Ghalib’s Urdu Diwan into my shoulder bag and carried it with me to the hospital. We arrived at the hospital. It was twinkling with lights like a beacon dispelling the darkness of winter morning. The lobby sparkled. A steady stream of people flowed through the doors. Nurses and hospital staff reporting for duty. My name was called. We moved along, up the stairs to the second floor and into a cozy cubicle.

I wasn’t alone; I had been allowed two companions, and my husband and a close friend, a doctor, accompanied me. But, with me, I brought a secret third.

The columnist is Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia in the US.

X: @FarooqiMehr

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, April 26th, 2026