na bazm apni na apna saaqi

Interpretation

Shaayar Bhopali seems to muse, with wistfulness and acceptance, about dispossession and impermanence of life.

Nothing arrives with you. Nothing leaves with you. The bazm (gathering, party) was never yours; you were a guest at best, a gatecrasher at worst. The saaqi (wine-pourer) poured for others; the jaam (cup) was borrowed. Every philosophy that has looked honestly at the human condition has arrived here: the Buddhists with anicca, the Sufis with fanaa, the Stoics with their borrowed time.

Marcus Aurelius put it plainly: you do not own your children, your wealth, your body, even your breath. They have been given to you temporarily, to be reclaimed soon. The wise man, therefore, holds everything lightly. Not with indifference, but with the awareness that the return is inevitable. Grief at loss, for the Stoics, was confusion... mourning the repossession of something that was never yours to keep.

Epictetus, himself a former slave, understood this most viscerally. Even your freedom, even your body...borrowed. The only thing truly yours is how you choose to meet each moment before the loan is called in.