Saqiya Mara Daryab

Saqiya Mara Daryab — O Cupbearer, Look After Me — is addressed to the saqi in one of the tradition's more complex registers: the speaker is already 'drunk from griefs' without having touched wine, which means the intoxication of grief is indistinguishable from the intoxication of wine, and the disgrace is the same. The cup being requested is not to add to the intoxication but to legitimize it — to replace the shameful drunkenness of grief with the at-least-explicable drunkenness of wine.

'Do not make me repent, O ascetic, anymore from wine and intoxication / Free me from all reckoning — make me heedless of my end' — the ascetic (zahid) who would impose repentance is the standard obstacle in the ghazal's antinomian tradition. The appeal to be freed from reckoning (hisab) and made heedless of one's end is an appeal for the same amnesia that genuine intoxication provides — not to know what is coming, not to be required to account for what has been.

'I weep inwardly from fear of disgrace / My quiet laughter will drag me to the end' — the final couplet's paradox is the most acute: the speaker weeps inside from fear of the disgrace that their outward laughter might produce. The laughter is a performance; beneath it is weeping. And this quiet laughter — the social mask — will persist until the end. The cup is asked for as a way to make the mask unnecessary; the song ends without the cup arriving.