Ta Ba Jafayat Khosham

Ta Ba Jafayat Khosham — I Was Content With Your Cruelty — is one of the most psychologically precise poems in Zahir's catalog. The opening paradox is the poem's engine: the speaker had adapted to, even found a kind of peace in, the beloved's cruelty (jafa). Now that she has 'abandoned cruelty' — become kind, or simply indifferent, or departed entirely — the familiar suffering has been withdrawn. The speaker is left disoriented, not relieved. A new manner (tarz-e no) has been 'newly established' and the speaker does not know how to inhabit it.

The second and third stanzas map the consequences of this new arrangement: 'You have blocked the way of my salvation from every side / You have cut my hope from everywhere.' The cruelty was at least a form of engagement; what follows is a total closing of access. The speaker's salvation (najat, also meaning escape, liberation) has been blocked not from one direction but from all sides simultaneously. This is a worse condition than active cruelty — at least cruelty implies continued attention.

The penultimate stanza — 'Last night you were drinking wine from the rival's hand / Have I gone astray, or have you made the mistake?' — introduces the rival for the first time, and with it a question of moral accounting that the poem refuses to resolve. The final line — 'I had a hundred thousand kisses to claim from your lips / Whatever you have given me — you have repaid the debt' — ends in cold ledger language. A love that began in boundless debt is declared settled by the beloved's own accounting. The speaker accepts the closure without accepting the justice of it.