Gar Che Mastain Kharabaim

Though we are drunk and ruined — and the ruin is the whole point. The kharabat, the tavern, the wreck, is where the Sufis from Rumi to Hafiz located the real thing: outside the mosque, outside respectability, among the drunk and the disreputable, where love actually happens.

Zahir doesn't make ruin sound tragic. His arrangement is warm, nearly festive, which is exactly right. Here, to be ruined is not to have failed but to have arrived — to have shed whatever needed shedding and reached the state where genuine feeling becomes possible.