એક રાજા હતો એક રાણી હતી

'એક રાજા હતો, એક રાણી હતી' is not originally Befaam's line — it belongs to every Gujarati childhood, the ritual opening of a grandmother's bedtime story. The ghazal's whole devastation is in what he does with it in the second line: 'એ તો તારી ને મારી કહાણી હતી' — that was your story and mine. The lovers are promoted to king and queen and buried in the same breath, because the fairy-tale formula only ever describes people who are gone. The radif હતી, "was," then holds every couplet that follows in that same completed past: the poem is not a love story but the telling of one afterwards, from the far side of its ending.

The middle couplets walk back through the life the opening has already closed. The speaker lost his way without ever noticing the moment it happened — the whole road, વાટ, was unfamiliar from the start. Love itself is the one old thing in a life of new bewilderments: only the experiences were new, the affection was ancient, પુરાણી. Then the ghazal's bleakest accounting, delivered with a shrug: he only ever spent his days, for what other income did life offer? The most celebrated sher makes destitution cosmic. The speaker owns a single blanket — the sky — and when night falls and he actually looks at it, he finds that even this is કાણી, riddled with holes. In one stroke the stars stop being ornaments and become the tears in a poor man's only cover.

The maqta performs Befaam's signature turn toward his own death, but with unusual bitterness worn as grandeur: how magnificent was Befaam's death — that day, તે દિ', there was a feast, ઉજાણી, among his enemies. Even his dying is narrated in the fairy-tale past, the last event of the story the first line promised. Ashit Desai's musical setting, sung in his own voice, gave the ghazal its wide afterlife, and its opening couplet has become one of those lines Gujarati listeners can complete before the singer does.