When The Mirror Melts

I saw my Lord with the eye of the heart. I asked, ‘Who are You?’ He replied, ‘You.’
— Mansūr al-Ḥallāj

Poetry as a Science

Al-Ḥallāj’s ¹ cry is not logical or deductive. It is poetic. For centuries, poets in the Sufi world have served as metaphysicians questioning reality, selfhood, and God not through proofs, but through verse. In the Urdu literary tradition, no poetic form has carried this burden more beautifully than the Ghazal. In the West, we often approach these same questions through dense philosophical prose.

Heidegger wrote thousands of pages on “being.” Descartes turned to reason. But in Persian and Urdu traditions — shaped by Sufi thought — it is poetry that bears the weight of metaphysics. Not essay, but image. Not exposition, but suggestion. The idiomatic nature of Persian, with its layered meanings and flexible syntax, lends itself to this kind of mystical recursion. Ghazals don’t argue; they shimmer.

During my college years studying computer science, I had to take a foreign language to graduate. I chose Urdu mostly out of convenience since my parents speak it, never expecting to stumble into a new world and fall in love with its poetry.

The ghazal does not deliver meaning plainly. It traffics in paradox, multiplicity, and feeling. It doesn’t explain; it entangles. Its lines move like riddles whispered across centuries, riddles that ask not to be solved, but felt. Formally, the ghazal is a type of poem composed of discrete, self-contained couplets called shers. Though the couplets share a topic and each sher is made of two lines, known as misrahs , common meter and end-rhyme scheme, they are not expected to continue one another. Instead, they orbit the same philosophical constellation — each one complete, yet illuminated differently by the presence of other couplets.

To enter a ghazal is to accept disorientation. You are not being led down a path; you are stepping into a mirrored chamber, each reflection offering a different glimpse of desire, loss, divinity, or doubt.

These poems live in a shared symbolic universe. A rose is never just a flower. A garden is never just a garden. Poets borrow, subvert, and respond to one another across time echoing images and lines like call and response across centuries. The ghazal is not repetition, but recursion. This essay explores four couplets — from Sauda and Ghalib — and how they speak to love, annihilation, the divine, and ultimately, the fragile mirrors through which we attempt to know the world.

In the Beginning, There Was Longing

پیش از ظہور ِ مرغِ چمن خادمانِ عشق
بنتے تھے رشتۂ رگِ گل دام کے لئے

pesh az zuhoor-e-murgh-e-chaman, khādīmān-e-‘ishq
bantay thay rishta-e-rag-e-gul dām ke liye

Literal Translation:
“Before the appearance of the garden’s bird (i.e., before spring), the servants of love were weaving the veins of flowers into snares.”

Commentary:
Mirza Muhammad Rafi Sauda (1713–1781) is often remembered for satire and spectacle, but this couplet gestures toward something quieter, more elemental. A creation myth without gods. A beginning stitched not by science or scripture, but by desire. He imagines a time before time, before spring, before the world had even unfurled its colors —and even then, the servants of love were already at work.

When I first read this couplet in class, I didn’t quite grasp it. The Persian vocabulary alone slowed me down. Yet something about the imagery played on repeat. “The bird of the garden” — how strange and delicate. The servants of love weaving flowers felt mythic, calming. It wasn’t until my professor explained the symbols I’d encountered that I realized I’d stumbled into a new dimension.

The garden (چمن / chaman) is a recurring symbol in the ghazal tradition, often standing in for life, beauty, or paradise. The bird of the garden (مرغِ چمن / murgh-e-chaman) represents the soul, the poet, or life itself stirring into form. Spring isn’t just a season, it’s the beginning of being. And the bird’s appearance (ظہور / zuhūr) marks the arrival of awareness, language, selfhood. So when Sauda writes “before the bird appeared,” he gestures toward a primordial state — pre- language, pre-creation. A void.

And who dwells in that void? The servants of love. The phrase servants of love (خادمانِ عشق / khādimān-e-‘ishq) existing before creation suggests they are not just human lovers or poets, but cosmic weavers, forces responsible for threading the world together. Not just for love, but for the vulnerability it demands. The trap (دام / dām) isn’t sinister, but it is binding. To live is to be ensnared by beauty, by feeling, by the ache of wanting. In this vision, love is not an emotion; it is a law of nature that predates matter. It doesn’t follow creation — it initiates it.

I’ve spent most of my life surrounded by systems — mathematical, computational, efficient. We live in a world that privileges empiricism. We’re taught about the Big Bang, dark matter, galaxies spinning. But Sauda offers a different origin story. What if it isn’t logic that holds the universe together, but longing?

Even in calling them “servants,” Sauda flips the power dynamic. They are not the origin, only the beginning of the beginning.

When the Mirror Melts

عبرت طلب ہے حلِ معمائے آگہی
شبنم گداز آئینۂ اعتبار ہے

‘ibrat talab hai ḥall-e mu‘ammā-e āgahi
shabnam-gudāz ā’īna-e i‘tiḳād hai

Literal Translation:
“The solution to the riddle of awareness demands caution; the mirror of belief melts like dewdrops.”

Commentary:
Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1797 – 1869) is the undisputed titan of Urdu poetry. His very name, Ghalib, means “the conqueror” or “the boss” and one only needs to read a few of his couplets to understand why he gave himself this title. Where other poets wept or worshipped, Ghalib interrogated. He was never content with just beauty; he wanted the blueprints too. This couplet is one of his most haunting warnings.

Personally, I imagine a leaf after a rain shower. An oval drop of water clings to the edge, and in that droplet, I catch my reflection. The entire world, inside a single glimmer. This is the Matrix, where knowledge isn’t empowering but perilous. Ghalib warns us: probe too deeply into the nature of reality, and it begins to dissolve. The mirror — the polished surface of belief — melts like morning dew the moment a question touches it.

There’s a Neoplatonic echo here: the material world as illusion, a thin reflection. Deep inquiry doesn’t bring clarity, it dissolves the frame entirely. To seek understanding is to risk unmaking the world. Ghalib’s sher reads less like an answer and more like a whispered warning: look too closely, and the mirror won’t reflect — it will disappear.

As engineers and scientists, we’re trained to value concreteness, precision, and rigor. There’s pride in solving problems, in cracking open the unknown with logic and deduction. But Ghalib troubles that instinct. Not all riddles want to be solved. Some truths, he suggests, are too fragile to touch. The moment you examine them, they’re gone.

After the Flame

دل میں ذوقِ وصل و یادِ یار تک باقی نہیں
آگ اس گھر میں لگی ایسی کہ جو تھا جل گیا

dil meñ zauq-e waṣl o yād-e yār tak bāqī nahīñ
aag is ghar meñ lagī aisī ki jo thā jal gayā

Literal Translation:
“In my heart, not even the taste of union or the memory of the beloved remains; such a fire broke out in this house that all that was burned away.”

Commentary:
Ghalib once again turns inward. If the mirror in the last poem dissolved at the touch of awareness, this one shatters in flame. There’s no trace of the beloved left. Not even the desire to remember them.

At first glance, this couplet reads like heartbreak, a love so thoroughly lost that nothing remains. Not the joy of reunion (waṣl), not even the ache of remembrance (yād-e-yār). Just ash. Just absence.

But in the ghazal tradition, the beloved is never just a person. Sometimes they are the object of romantic longing. Sometimes they are God. Often, they are both at once: cruel, distant, and divine. The beloved never arrives when we need them most. That absence, that ache, is the lifeblood of the form.

Here, though, the heartbreak is not loss. It is annihilation. Ghalib writes not of desire denied, but of desire extinguished. A fire so total it consumes not only love, but the capacity to long. In Sufi cosmology, fanā’ is the obliteration of the self in divine love. The heart is the house, and the fire is ecstasy. It burns so completely that even memory turns to smoke. What remains is baqā’ — a new self, scorched and enduring, defined only by what it has lost. To return to the world after union is not illumination but mourning. Ghalib is writing from that aftermath. From the stillness after the blaze. From a self that has seen the infinite and survived.

If I had Never Been

نہ تھا کچھ تو خدا تھا، کچھ نہ ہوتا تو خدا ہوتا
ڈبویا مجھ کو ہونے نے، نہ ہوتا میں تو کیا ہوتا

na thā kuchh to ḳhudā thā, kuchh na hotā to ḳhudā hotā
ḍuboyā mujh ko hone ne, na hotā maiñ to kyā hotā

Literal Translation:
“When there was nothing, there was God. If there were nothing, there would still be God. It is my being that drowned me; if I had not existed, what would have happened?”

Commentary:
If Sauda speaks from the edge of creation, and Ghalib’s earlier couplets peer through the wreckage, this one speaks from the eye of the storm. Existence itself is catastrophe. Another of Ghalib’s, this couplet begins with a near-theological certainty: when there was nothing, there was God. Even now, if there were nothing, God would remain. But then the second line turns inward — and downward. It is my being that drowned me. As if to say: awareness is not transcendence. It is weight. It is ruin.

This is Ghalib at his most destabilizing. The sher opens like a prayer and closes like a paradox. You read it once and think you understand. Then it folds. And folds again. It’s a perfect example of what makes the ghazal so addictive: a single couplet can contain simultaneous, contradictory, even mutually exclusive meanings.

One reading is of submission: God is the constant; we are the error. The soul suffers under the burden of its own being. If I had never existed, I might have remained with Him — free, unbroken. Another reading feels like rebellion: God made me, and in doing so, He doomed me. Existence is not a gift — it is the curse.

And still another is meta-poetic: Ghalib positioning himself as essential. If I had not existed, what would have happened? Who else would have wrestled meaning from madness, language from fire?

The couplet is theological, philosophical, poetic, and fundamentally unresolvable. It disturbs the intellect and the soul at once. The ghazal does not seek clarity. It seeks the shimmer. The paradox. The ache. In two lines, Ghalib doesn’t just ask us to ponder the mystery of existence, he makes us feel it in our chest. And indeed, that is why he is called Ghalib — the boss, the conqueror. I am just an engineer, trained to keep data safe in a database. But I need Ghalib to understand who I am outside of that. To glimpse the part of myself that aches, fractures, burns — and still returns, searching for longing. Something like truth.

What Remains After Knowing

These couplets are not just expressions of feeling. They are ontological investigations, asking: What is love? What is being? What is truth? What burns away when we ask too many questions — and what, if anything, remains?In Sauda, love predates creation. In Ghalib, it shatters mirrors, burns houses, and questions the very fact of being. These are not poems to debug, they are poems to survive. Each sher leaves you a little less certain, a little more undone.

One commonly thinks of the Matrix, of taking the red pill and struggling with the truths it exposes us to. But, the Ghazal came well before the Matrix movies were released. It depicted transness that the Wachowski sisters may have stepped into unknowingly. The shers are not intrinsically gendered. The beloved’s gender is never specified. And indeed, poets like Ghalib were witnessing the devastation of colonialism. A colonialism that crystalized the binary genders in a region of the world where languages like Bangla were not gendered but became so with time. Every queer person has felt the ache presented in these *shers, has felt the discomfort of knowing they are not whom the world told them they are. The ghazal’s universality shines in even Hollywood, where the Wachowski sisters likely knew nothing of ghazals or sufism, but wished to portray this ache and what it is to witness the mirror melt.

As an engineer, I try to mirror the world in code — to represent it, compute it, solve it. But code is not the world. It is a translation. And in a culture that treats science as the only valid form of knowing, these poets remind us of something older: there are other ways of understanding. The ghazal doesn’t offer certainty. It offers recursion. Reverberation. A thousand mirrors reflecting one another in paradox and pain.

Poetry is not a lesser epistemology. It is the tool we reach for when logic fails. It is how mystics grieve, how philosophers confess, how we approach the divine without naming it. Perhaps that’s why I keep returning to poetry, not to analyze it, but to be changed by it. To remember that before there was order, there was desire. Before there was light, there was longing. And that maybe what holds the universe together isn’t atoms, but ache. And the poets? They were its first scientists. Smashing clocks to understand time. Colliding words like particles. Breaking lines, twisting meanings, pressing language to its edge — and in doing so, illuminate what logic alone cannot reach.