In the shadowed twilight of 19th-century Delhi, where the once-mighty Mughal Empire crumbled under the iron heel of British colonialism, Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib—pen name Ghalib, meaning “the conqueror”—breathed his last on February 15, 1869, at the age of 71. His life had been a tapestry woven with threads of unparalleled poetic genius, profound philosophical inquiry, personal tragedy, and unyielding wit. Orphaned at five after his father’s death in battle, married at thirteen to Umrao Begum (with whom he would lose all seven children in infancy), financially destitute despite royal titles like Dabir-ul-Mulk and Najm-ud-Daula bestowed by Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar II, and a witness to the devastating 1857 Indian Rebellion that reduced Delhi to ruins, Ghalib’s existence was one of exquisite sorrow and intellectual rebellion. His ghazals, written in both Urdu and Persian, delved into the mysteries of love (ishq), the divine (khuda), the self (khudi), and the illusory nature of reality. Lines like “Na tha kuchh to khuda tha, kuch na hota to khuda hota / Duboya mujhko hone ne, na hota main to kya hota” (When nothing was, God was; had nothing been, God would still be / My very existence has drowned me; had I not been, what would I have been?) captured the Sufi-inspired unity of being (wahdat al-wujud), questioning ego, creation, and the divine in ways that transcended his era.
Yet the cosmos, in its infinite mercy and curiosity, deemed such a soul too luminous to fade into oblivion. The Eternal Muse—a primordial entity embodying the creative force behind all poetry, song, and word across multiverses—intervened. Ghalib’s verses had not merely echoed human longing; they had subtly resonated with the fabric of reality itself, bending probabilities in ways even he never suspected. As his mortal form lay in his haveli in Ballimaran, Chandni Chowk, his soul was offered reincarnation not into another earthly life, but into a high-fantasy realm called Elyndor. In this world, magic is fundamentally linguistic, and “the Verse-Weave” governs existence.

Chapter 12 - ull