Rehan Mara Az Dard

Rehan Mara Az Dard — Free Me From Pain — belongs to the same cluster as Awara Bechara Qalbe Man: both begin with the appeal for release from a catalog of afflictions and both end with the school-of-love metaphor. The appeal here is somewhat more compressed, moving quickly from pain and weakness through the symbolic elements of suffering — eternal burning (suzan-e abadi), autumn windstorm (tufan-e khazaan), crimson tears — before arriving at the central image of the heart broken into a hundred pieces.

'Free me — free me' — the repeated refrain performs the urgency of the appeal. In the Persian lyric tradition, repetition signals the inadequacy of a single utterance: one 'free me' is insufficient to convey the condition; the repetition reaches for emphasis that language alone cannot provide.

'I was in the school of your love / You gave lessons but did not make me your teacher' — the school metaphor appears to be a characteristic feature of this particular song family in Zahir's catalog. The beloved as teacher who instructs the speaker in love's curriculum but refuses to confer the authority that should come with mastery. The speaker has completed the course and been denied the qualification. To be taught everything and given no standing in what one has learned is its own specific form of abandonment.