When the Words Wait for You

A personal journey into Gulzar’s world

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For the longest time, Gulzar was just a name to me, someone whose words seemed to float in a quieter emotional space I hadn't yet entered. A lyricist par excellence weaving words into melodies I knew but never really paused to understand. His songs would play in the background — beautiful, yes, but distant. Like the scent of rain when you’re indoors, untouched and dry.

And then one day, ‘Mora gora rang lai le’ played again.

I had heard it countless times before. It belonged to the world of old radios, Doordarshan evenings, and memories not mine. But this time, something shifted. The words — gentle, aching, quietly brave — moved past my ears into the soft, unguarded corners of me.

It wasn’t just a song anymore. It was a request, a surrender, a quiet rebellion. “Mohe shaam rang dai de…” Let me dissolve into dusk. Let me leave behind who I’ve been. Let me love, not as a role assigned, but as a truth discovered.

Maybe you don’t truly hear Gulzar until you’ve lived a little. Until you’ve lost things you didn’t know mattered, lost things which you thought will be there forever. Until silence becomes more comforting than noise. Until dignity begins to mean more than pride.

Because Gulzar doesn’t shout. He waits. And when you’re ready, his words walk toward you — soft-footed, like someone returning home after a long journey, much wiser.

Then came another line that caught me mid-step:

“Ek laj roke paiyya, ek moh khiche baiyya…” One arm of love pulls you forward. The other — modesty, memory, fear — stills your feet.

It’s not just poetry. It’s that moment in life when you want to leap, but don’t. When you’re on the edge of a yes, but can’t quite say it. It’s the weight of unsaid things that lives in that line.

And then, almost like a whisper in the dark:

“Jaaun kidhar, na jaanu, hamka koi bataai de…” Where do I go? I don’t know. Someone please tell me.

It’s such a simple line, and yet it broke something in me. Because isn’t that what we ask, over and over, in different forms? When a job ends. When someone doesn’t love you back. When you sit quietly with your coffee and the world feels too much and too little, all at once.

Where do I go now?

As if to echo that sense of lost direction, Gulzar gives us another paradox — of peace that feels lonelier than pain ever did.

“Dil mein jab dard basey tthe toh guzar jaati thheen shaamein Aaj sukoon aane laga hai toh viraan bahut hai”

When the heart hosted sorrow, evenings used to pass. Now that peace has arrived, it feels barren.

We talk so much about finding peace, about healing, but Gulzar gently reminds us that even pain had presence, had warmth. It filled the room. It gave us something to lean against in the quiet. Now, with peace, the air feels too empty, the evenings too long. That’s the genius of his writing — not that he makes you understand pain, but that he makes you miss it.

And just when I thought I had felt it all, came the rain.

Yara sili sili … This song — it’s about the moist sting of longing. Not the dramatic storm, but the damp night of separation that burns slowly. Soft, almost tender, and yet it hurts. Like loneliness wearing the scent of wet earth.

And in the middle of it, Gulzar quietly asks:

“Pichhli gali mein jane kya chhod aayi main…” What did I leave behind in that last street?

He never answers. And that’s what hurts most. Because how often do we move on without knowing we’ve just closed a chapter? We leave rooms with people still inside us. We walk away from old selves, still waving at us in memory.

And sometimes, we lose things we had taken for granted: A mother’s hand brushing your hair while you pretend to be annoyed. The clink of cups shared in silence with a friend who understood your silences better than your words. A window that opened to a view you never really looked at. A version of yourself that once felt whole.

Along this path of life, I think I lost myself. Not in some dramatic, cinematic way. But slowly. In schedules, responsibilities, unfinished emails, and the quiet pressure to hold everything together. I became someone else, may be more responsible, may be more capable. But somewhere, the one who used to just be… faded.

And now, when I hear Gulzar ask — “Pichhli gali mein kya chhod aayi main…” I want to answer: I left myself.

But maybe, through these songs, I’m finding my way back. Like Gulzar says in the next line “Beeti hui galiyon se phir se guzarna.” Maybe poetry is not just about understanding the world — it’s about remembering the self. And with every whispered line, every pause between words, I come a little closer.

To stillness. To softness. To me.

And so, I sit here today, a bit older, perhaps softer, with a heart that startles more easily at poetry and pauses more often at silence. I don’t know when exactly the shift happened. Maybe it was growing older. Maybe it was breaking a little. Maybe it was simply life, doing what it always does — wearing you down just enough so the truth can finally seep in.

But I do know this: I’m grateful for that one evening when “Mora gora rang lai le” didn’t just play in the room — it played through me. For that moment when a line became a mirror. For Gulzar, who didn’t offer advice or lessons, only words and company — for what I had felt but never known how to say. And for the quiet comfort that somewhere out there, someone else is whispering — “Jaaun kidhar, na janu…” and finding, in Gulzar’s words, a way back to themselves.

I don’t know if what I held from his poems was what he meant to give. Meanings shift when passed through the prism of a half-formed, scarcely-lived life, and a language I only know in echoes.

But …. if a line once lingered in you, uninvited, untranslatable, the way it did in me, then perhaps we were never strangers.

Perhaps we met somewhere between breath and stillness, in the hush between two syllables, in the pauses and continuations, that neither of us could name, but both of us understood.

And if you felt it too, then I’m glad to have found you — not here, but in that place where meaning becomes presence.

All lyrics quoted in this essay are written by Gulzar and remain the copyright of their respective owners.

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