Slowly the rate of appearance of ‘should’ves’, ‘could’ves’ and ‘would’ves’ in my head is dimishing. It is a relief. Of course they will come back in varying degrees again to torture me and I will be looking out for them. They are most unhelpful. I hope I can make them feel really unwelcome when they do arrive. I don’t think they understand the pointlessness of their existence in this context. Of course there are lessons to be learnt by many of us from what happened but there are other less painful ways of doing it.

Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib is one of the most prolific and delicate urdu poets. Translation of his verses does them no favours at all. On the contrary, takes away some of their beauty. Here is an attempt at sharing some of his couplets with you:

If there is nothing present except you,
what is all this noise then, oh God?

When nothing existed, only God existed,
if nothing had ever existed only God would have existed.
Existence did me in, if I had never existed what could have happened?

It’s been a while since Ghalib ceased to exist, but I still remember him.
At every occasion he would say, how things could have been

Its not as if the world has stopped without the ramshackle Ghalib,
Why then do you cry so copiously, why wail so loudly?

Thousands of desires, each one to die for
So many of my wishes came true, but it still feels very few did.