Here we stand, after so many assignations, strangers after all. So how many more encounters till we become friends?

When will the spotless verdant spring return? And how many monsoons are required to wash our bloodstains away?

Numerous are the wounds of our love which has now lapsed. And unforgiving are the dawns that came after those forgiven nights.

What our hearts wished, our splintering hearts gave no respite to be fulfilled. Nor could we voice our complaints as lovers cajolingly do.

You went to tell them all this, Faiz, in your set of clean simple lines. But even after you did, what you wanted to tell remains untold after all.

Another evening of separation, don’t ask me now, How she had come and how she had left.

This you see clutched in my hand, is just a heart, A plaything, it can be easily distracted by something else And this, which is standing before you, is just another life That will somehow get lived.

At the gatherings I fill the lamps with oil of memory Of such rapture, of such beauty! For the stricken moon has set somewhere somehow And this night of exile has to be light somehow.

When I had invoked her all my mornings became fragrant, And now when I invoke the pain she gave me, all my nights trash like so many silvers of fish dying on a grassy bank!

Wiping clean the slate of my heart, I thought I could plunge forward But when I begin to tell these lies to myself, those words change without my changing!

And then when did the travelers of the night leave, O Faiz? Where did the breeze disembark and where did the morning go?

Again listening to Abida rip the evening with her haunting voice giving shape to these words of Faiz, written more than 50 years ago in a hospital in Karachi, I couldn't but help to write them along in English.

Here is another version of the same ghazal.

Dear Life, I am not cross with you as much as I am startled by you, and as much as I am harried, unable to answer The childlike questions you are asking me.

Dear Life you constantly surprise me. for I didn't imagine that to for me to live, I would have to bear such happiness as much as I have borne pain. And that tonight I if smile or if I cry I have to do that as if I am taking out a loan that has to be repaid in full!

Dear Life if today these eyes are full With tears, I know that tomorrow, tomorrow if it ever comes, would be left pining for these tears that today that I have now suddenly shed in surprise because you, Dear Life, you surprised me