As a singer in training, my first lessons were not in melody but in rhythm – how to hold a note within a certain cycle of beats, land syllables on the right matra, and listen for the breath between lines. I had joined the course a while after it had started and felt the pressure of an already sorted-out classroom where everyone was long familiar with each other. Dizzy with excitement and fear, I sat cross-legged and nervous in the Gol room, scrutinized by Ustaad. With ragas playing in accord in ways not familiar to me, I finally saw how poetry danced to rhythm. I grew up in a conventionally religious household, and for the longest time, we had no television. Baba had a few Tina Sani and Mehdi Hasan cassettes, which helped me see how a ghazal would sound when sung, what melody would satiate the fragrance of a gul, or how a behlawa would reciprocate the hunger of longing. And later, when I got the chance to look up mushaira recordings on the internet, I learned about tarannum – the practice of reading poetry through a melody purposefully crafted to express its melancholy and yearning – and I could feel my heart banish the mundane for this joy of being able to imagine ghazal as a melody.

I have always thought of poems as human-made mirages of sounds because of how they let my imagination flow into whatever those sounds imply. Before a word is formed and elevated through poetry, it exists only as a sound. Those sounds are then written down as words with spellings. Other than their contextual memories, when arranged in a pattern, these sounds create rhythm, dictated by oral prosody – how you pause, break, and move through their meanings.

In the early eighth century, a man named Khalil Bin Ahmed was haunted by this idea. While strolling through a marketplace, he was struck by the sounds of rhythmic hammering.
Tak tak Tak
Mu ha bat
Upon listening attentively, he declared: “By God! There is something in this.” He became obsessed with what he had heard. Already thoroughly able to understand music, he reflected on the patterns of musical rhythm, which in turn inspired him to systematize the principles of poetic meter. He noted that poetry’s metrical structure relies on an intricate lattice of long and short syllables. He devised a technique to break down sounds of syllables into two categories based on their movements in the pronunciation of the word: Letters with inherent movement were called mutaharrik, while those with a resting sound were called saakin. So in the word ساکن, for instance, the first letter, س, is moving, while آ has no movement, making it rested. In the word و,کو is saakin, whereas ک is mutaharrik. Khalil Bin Ahmed then organized these sounds into rhythmic beats of 1s and 2s. A mutaharrik paired with a saakin got the weight of 2, while letters that did not pair got the weight of 1. It is these 1s and 2s that drive the fundamental rhythm in a ghazal; they form the symphony of each word. When these words come together and produce a particular sound, they form a verse, which combines the sounds into a rhythmic structure.

And so, from the ordinary clatter of the bustling Suq al-Sighar, the mathematics of poetry was born. Khalil is said to have pieced together the rules of Arooz while residing in Basra in present-day Iraq. This term later became the recognized name for the discipline, the science of poetry, and led to the rise of grandeur in Arabic poetry. It became the basis of the ghazal in Farsi and then in Urdu.

I spent my first lessons in a state of confusion. From what I knew of Western musical rhythm, beats were composed of identical weights. The rhythm of classical music with its language of informally weighted syllables felt entirely foreign to me, and I went into a spiral of choices. Ustaad Murtaza Niazi was an Air Force veteran with the aura of a transcendental being. Shoulders squared, chest straight, and a voice free of any doubts, his decrees sometimes filled me with terror, and I felt conscious of my voice in front of the group of students. After a few weeks, though, I started to feel my body’s rhythm – the quick grapple of my motorbike’s clutch, or the rikshaws honking in peak traffic at Shahrah-e-Faisal, all these visuals of music slowly started to reside in my stomach until I could finally count my breaths in a teental loop.

The Ustaad also filled me with pure inspiration, and it was ghazal again that brought me back to him with his mesmerizing calls of longing in Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s words:

گلوں میں رنگ بھرے بادِ نو بہار چلے
چلے بھی آؤ کہ گلشن کا کاروبار چلے

Long before I listened to the great Mehdi Hassan Khan Sahab or Ustaad singing these words through their khayal and infusing them with the ghazal’s idea of longing, I had heard my Urdu teacher in Matric read it. Miss Shagufta dissected each line and presented it in its own sonic glory, as if it were a melody based on rhythm. Over the following weeks, my mind ran through a loop of similar pauses throughout the piece as soon as the next line hit. I would stand in apprehension, weighing down the syllables and staring at the walls of my classroom, aged with white distemper paint.

Beats, matray, pulses – rhythmic structures that set the melody. In classical music, the singer, or gayak, follows a pattern called taal, which dictates how the lyrics, the bol, align with the beat, particularly by placing the syllables of the words over the beats taken. The unusual pattern of compositions with ⅞ beats per bar, where each beat is divided into three parts, draws the listener in through the quick interplay of a compound note. Similarly, the ghazal works with a structured pattern, a rhythm anchored in a cohesive melody. The arrangement of these sounds or syllables in a verse of a ghazal is called Behr, the foundational pattern of every single line. This results in a perfect balance of rhythm and rhyme.

This couplet from Ghalib shows how this loop shapes a ghazal:

ہم وہاں ہیں جہاں سے ہم کو بھی
کچھ ہماری خبر نہیں آتی

The first line is:

ہم وہاں ہیں جہاں سے ہم کو بھی

• ہَم وَ ہاں ہیں (2, 1, 2, 2) – فَاْعِلاتُن
• جَ ہاں سے ہَم (1, 2, 1, 2) – مُفاْعِلُن
• کو بھی (2, 2) – فِعْلُن

The second line says:

کچھ ہماری خبر نہیں آتی

• کُچھ ہَ ما ری (2, 1, 2, 2) – فَاْعِلاتُن
• خَ بَر نَ ہیں (1, 2, 1, 2) – مُفاْعِلُن
• آ تی (2, 2) – فِعْلُن

Radeef and qafiya play pivotal roles in creating the musicality and rhyming scheme of the verse. Qafiya is the preceding note or sound that creates the resonance, and then the radeef comes in, which is the last word of the second line for each couplet. In Ghalib’s ghazal with the above couplet, the qafiya – the rhyming pattern – is “بَر” and the radeef – the repeated phrase – is “نہیں آتی”.

Agha Shahid Ali wrote in his ghazal ‘Tonight’,

Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell tonight?
Whom else from Rapture’s Road will you expel tonight?

The sound of “ell” is the qafiya, while “tonight” is repeated as a radeef at the end of each line. What makes this couplet extraordinary is how it exemplifies the timeless and universal nature of the ghazal prosody in an entirely different language, carrying the weight of a centuries-old tradition rooted in Arabic and Persian. In this way, Agha Shahid Ali’s ghazal illustrates how, through its rigid yet liberating structure, it becomes a vessel for emotional expression while simultaneously accounting for the technicality of the poetic expression.

Long before I entered Ustaad’s classroom, the first time I truly felt this rhythm was while reading Mohsin Naqvi’s ‘Rakht e Shab’. The intricacy of its sounds overwhelmed me, and I found myself mapping the beats over the couplets. As a novice musician back then, rhythm to me often felt simply like a metrical 4/4 time pattern, while it was poetry that carried me into its experiential embrace, dissolving ghazals into pure rhythm.

From Khalil Bin Ahmed’s innovation in the eighth-century bazaar to Ghalib’s immortal verses on top of these beats and Agha Shahid Ali’s modern adaptations, the ghazal transcends time, geography, and language. Its inherently rhythmic interpretation of poetry is why Faiz’s poems often feel like songs or how poems in a different language still kiss some parts of our skin. In that moment when a ghazal whispers its music in calculated silences and sounds, the listener is reminded of the pure joy of poetry, which, stripped of any attachments with meaning or identity, is experienced only as melody.