سرائیکی ڈیجیٹل لائبریری

دل پریم نگر ڈوں تانگھے

جتھاں پینڈے سخت اڑانگے

نہ راہ فرید نہ لانگھے

ہے پندھ پہوں مشکل دا

The heart yearns toward the City of Love, Prem Nagar. The stages are hard and crooked. Then the couplet turns. No road, Farid, and no fords. The journey of love is a journey of sheer difficulty.

The turn matters. The first hemistich describes difficulty. Difficulty belongs to the possible. A hard road is still a road. A traveller with provisions and patience will arrive. The second hemistich abandons difficulty for something else. No road. No crossing. This is what Derrida calls aporia in the strict sense. Not an obstacle on the path but the absence of path. A problem has a protocol. An aporia has none. Farid moves, within one couplet, from problem to aporia. The syntax itself performs the shift.

Why does the couplet insist on roadlessness? Because love, in this poetry, can only be a gift. And Derrida’s argument in Given Time is that the gift is impossible. The moment a gift is recognised, acknowledged, or returned, it enters the circle of exchange. It becomes debt, credit, transaction. A gift that circulates is no gift. The true gift must fall outside every economy of return. It is therefore impossible, and it is possible only as impossible.

Now read the geography again. A road is the infrastructure of return. A ford is where traffic crosses both ways. Goods travel roads. Payments travel roads. Gratitude travels roads. When Farid says no road and no fords, he abolishes the very possibility of circulation between the lover and Prem Nagar. Nothing sent toward the city can be repaid. Nothing can even be confirmed as received. The love given toward a roadless city is love placed permanently outside exchange. The couplet’s landscape enforces the gift’s condition. Roadlessness is not the misfortune of this love. It is its purity.

Here the decision enters. Derrida holds that a decision which follows a programme is not a decision. It is execution. The genuine decision must pass through the undecidable, without guarantee, without map. To set out on a marked road with stations and fords is procedure. Anyone can do it. To turn the heart toward Prem Nagar when no road exists is decision in the full sense. There is no warrant for the first step. There is no assurance of arrival. The lover decides, and the decision and the gift are one act. He gives himself toward a city that cannot answer.

But Derrida places one further condition on the gift, and it is the cruellest. The gift must not be recognised even by the giver. The lover who knows he is giving has already paid himself in self-regard. The circle closes from inside. This seems to make the gift unthinkable. Farid’s Indic register holds the answer in one word. سہجوں, sahjūṅ. Of itself. Spontaneously, without deliberation, without the ego keeping accounts. The sahaja of Indic mystical poetry is action that does not watch itself act. Love given sahjūṅ is love that never registers itself as a gift, and so never converts into credit. What Derrida can only state as a negation, the tradition names as a mode. And it fits his own strange phrase for the true decision. He calls it passive. The decision of the other in me. Sahaj is exactly that. Not effort, not calculation, not even choice as the ego knows choice. The heart turns toward Prem Nagar the way water finds its level. The turning is a decision, and no one made it.

One caution belongs here. Sahaj must not become a consolation. In some strands of Indic mystical poetry the sahaja state is the innate, already given, and the innate carries the lover home without ordeal. Read that way, sahaj dissolves the aporia into nature and the roadless country grows a secret road. The couplet does not permit this. It ends on difficulty and stops. No arrival, no grace clause, no exit. Sahjūṅ names how the gift is given, not a guarantee that it reaches.

The yearning stands in the present tense against a passage that does not exist. The heart keeps turning, of itself, toward a city that cannot answer. That is the gift. Given sahjūṅ, without road, without return, without even the giver’s knowledge. It is impossible. It is given anyway.