Yar Ba Ma Bewafaee

Yar Ba Ma Bewafaee — The Companion Is Being Faithless — is one of several songs in Zahir's catalog that takes an existing classical poem and adds the weight of his performance voice. The final stanza — 'Sweet-tongued Saadi in the path of love / From her lips begs for a kiss' — is a direct reference to Saadi Shirazi (c. 1210–1291/1292), the Persian poet whose Gulistan and Bustan are among the most widely read texts in the Persian literary canon. Saadi calling himself 'sweet-tongued' (shirin-zaban) is characteristic of his self-referential final verses (maqta), and Zahir's inclusion of this stanza places the song explicitly in the tradition of Saadi's ghazals.

The poem's central image — 'That faithless one extinguished the candle of my soul / She now illuminates another place' — is a particularly sharp formulation. The beloved is not merely absent; she is present elsewhere, using the same illuminating power that she withdrew from the speaker. The speaker's candle (soul) was extinguished to free her light for another location. The faithlessness is therefore not passive indifference but an active redistribution of warmth and light.

'Without cause she keeps distance from us' (be sabab duri mikonad az ma) — the 'without cause' is the poem's ethical claim. A faithfulness withdrawn for cause would be understandable, perhaps even just. The speaker's complaint is that no cause has been given and none exists. This positions the speaker as the aggrieved innocent and the beloved as capricious — a conventional stance in the ghazal tradition, though Zahir's delivery of it typically adds a note of bewilderment rather than accusation.