Two lines on the departing soul — and why everyone standing at the bedside has the whole scene backwards.
Two lines. That is all it took — two lines to say what whole libraries circle around and never land on. A soul, restless for its journey. A few breaths, holding it back. And the people of this world, watching from the doorway, whispering: this one is going to die.
I wrote this sher after sitting with a question I could not shake: when a person is dying, what is actually happening in that room? Not medically — really. Who is struggling, and against what? The answer, when it came, rearranged the entire scene.
کچھ سانسیں روکتی رہیں روح کو سفر سے
Kuch saansen rokti rahin rooh ko safar se
a few last breaths kept holding the soul back from departing.”
The scene everyone misreads
You have seen it, or you will. A room gone quiet. A body on a bed, breathing in a way that frightens the living — each breath slower, heavier, further apart. Someone whispers what everyone is thinking: yeh marne wala hai. This one is going to die.
Notice what that sentence does. It names the event by what the watchers are about to lose — a body among them — not by what is actually happening. Language always confesses the limits of the speaker. They call it death because they cannot see the safar.
The sher quietly corrects them without arguing. Look again, it says. This is not an ending you are witnessing. Koi jaa raha hai — someone is leaving.
The world reads it backwards
Here is the inversion at the heart of the sher, and it is worth sitting with: everyone at the bedside believes the dying person is fighting to stay. The gasping looks like resistance. The struggle looks like fear.
But the sher says the opposite. The rooh is beqarar — restless, impatient — for the journey. It is not the soul that is struggling. It is the body. Each of those labored breaths is a hand grabbing the traveler’s sleeve, whispering not yet.
So the scene, read correctly: the prison is fighting the prisoner’s release. The body clings; the soul departs. The struggle the onlookers see is real — they just have it backwards.
The last grip
Think of each saans as a thread. All your life, thousands of these threads have tied the musafir — the traveler — to the qaid-khana, the prison of the body. At the end, the threads do not all snap at once. They loosen one by one. That is what “kuch saansen” means: only a few threads left, and the body is losing its grip.
There is a harder truth inside this image. The body did not own the rooh — it borrowed it. The soul was an amanat, a trust placed in the body for a lifetime. Now the trust is being called back, and the borrower doesn’t want to return it.
Read this way, the gasping of the dying is not the soul fighting death. It is the borrower refusing to settle the account. And the beqarari of the rooh? That is the rightful owner, waiting at the door.
Beqarari is recognition
Now the deepest layer — the one this whole sher is built on. Why is the rooh restless at all, if it is going home?
Because restlessness is the signature of nearness. You are never restless for what is far. You are restless when the train has been announced and hasn’t arrived yet. The rooh is beqarar because home is close.
The Sufis say the soul remembers where it came from — rooh comes from Allah and returns to Allah — and at the edge of departure, memory sharpens into sight. This is why the dying so often gaze at something the living cannot see. That isn’t confusion. That is arrival, beginning early.
Beqarari is what it feels like
to stand in both worlds at once.
The restlessness is the friction between time and eternity: the body’s time down to a few breaths, while the rooh has already stepped out of time. Two clocks, running at different speeds, in the same room. No wonder the air feels strange.
Grip the sleeve, or open the door
This is where the philosophy turns practical — and this is what I would tell a loved one standing in that quiet room.
The people at the bedside have only two choices: grip the sleeve, or open the door. Clinging, wailing, begging the dying to stay — that is the world’s instinct, and it only tightens the negotiation. It adds more hands to the sleeve the traveler is trying to free.
The older wisdom is the opposite. Be calm. Recite. Make the room light. Let go with love. Talqeen — the gentle prompting of the departing one; a quiet room; unclenched hands. You cannot keep the traveler. You can only make the departure easy — the way you would hold a door open for someone you love, not block it.
So don’t count the breaths. Watch where the traveler is looking. And when the last thread loosens, don’t say he is gone. Say: he has arrived.
Leaving, not ending
Two lines gave us the traveler, the grip, the blind watchers, and the open door. That is why this sher matters to me — it doesn’t describe dying. It describes leaving, and it asks the living to learn the difference.
Every generation stands in that quiet room and misreads the scene. The body fails, and we call the failure the event. But the event was never the failing. The event was the departure — and departures, done rightly, are not tragedies. They are homecomings.
The next time you stand at such a bedside, remember the two lines. The soul is not being taken from you. It is being returned. And the beqarari you witness is not suffering.
It is recognition.
The Poet Decodes His Own Sher.
In this series, the poet has also chosen to decode his own sher — reading them in the light of his knowledge, experience, and the depth they carry. Every sher is approached not merely as a poetic expression, but as a reflection of a philosophical view of life.
What follows is not commentary from the outside, but the thinking from inside the verse.
The poet takes us back to the moment behind the words — the question, observation, experience, or thought from which the sher emerged. In doing so, the sher is not explained away; rather, another layer of its meaning is opened.
The reader is still free to see something different.
Because the purpose is not to tell the reader what the sher must mean.
It is to show what the poet saw when he wrote it — and then leave the door open for the reader to discover what they see.