سرائیکی ڈیجیٹل لائبریری

Khawaja Ghulam Farid begins one of his kafis with a simple line. Meda ishq wi tun, meda yaar wi tun. My love is You. My friend is You. In one breath he names two things, love and friend, and gives them both to the same You. A reader may pass over this quickly. But the line is doing serious work. It is placing love and friendship on one level.

The Stoics did not allow this. For them love and friendship were two different things. Friendship was calm. It was a bond between equals, built on virtue and good sense. Love was a fever. It was a disturbance of the soul, a thing to be controlled and at last removed. The wise man kept his friends and cured himself of his passions. Even when the Stoics joined the two, they made love serve friendship. Love was only a road. Friendship was the destination.

Farid goes the other way. He does not lower his love down to friendship. He raises his friendship up to love. His kafi is full of fever. There is madness and weeping in it. Farid does not wish to be cured. He wants the friend, but he also wants the fever. He does not want one without the other.

The chosen word is yaar. Yaar is not the distant beloved of the high poets. Yaar is the close one, the companion, the one you sit with and speak to without ceremony. Farid loved this word. By calling the Divine his yaar, he brings the Beloved into the circle of friendship. The Beloved is not only the one above. He is also the one who sits with you.

This is why he says tu. Tu is the word of intimacy. You do not say tu to a king. You say it to a friend. And you say it to your own self. This double use of the small word becomes the secret of the last lines.

The kafi ends on a condition. Je yaar Farid qubool kare. If the friend accepts. Then, says Farid, You are my Sarkar, You are my Sultan. But if the friend does not accept, nataan, then come the low words. Lowest, lesser, base, of no worth. Nothing. Without place.

Here two kinds of tu begin to play. One tu is the Beloved. The other tu seems to be Farid himself, spoken to in the second person, as a man speaks to his own heart. If the friend does not accept you, he says to himself, you are nothing.

But the two cannot be kept apart. And this is the proof. A worshipped beloved cannot be called low. You may call the high beloved cruel, and his beauty only grows. Lowness is a different matter. It breaks the worship, because it does not fit the worshipped one. It fits only a friend. A friend can become low and still be loved. That is the nature of friendship. So when Farid lets the low words rest on his tu, he is showing what kind of Beloved this is. This is a Beloved who is also a friend.

Look also at the full reach of the lines. The same tu is called Sultan and called nothing. No ordinary beloved can hold both. No ordinary friend can hold both. Only a Beloved who is a friend can be your king and your lowest companion at the same time.

So the kafi proves at its end what it claims at its beginning. Love and friendship are one register. And the small word tu carries the whole weight of it.