Ran: A ghazal

This poem was written around the idea of female agency, and thus, the main goal was to subvert the expectations that a ghazal reader may hold about the possibility and nature of female agency within a ghazal. This was done by modifying several thematic and formal conventions of the genre itself.

1. The syllable length is not uniform within some couplets; this was to highlight the intensity of these specific couplets and the breathlessness when a woman runs for their life from a male presence.

2. There is no raqeeb, the third in the ghazal love triangle, because I found it to be reductive to focus on that when writing about such a topic.

3. The qafiya, a set of rhyming words that directly precede the radeef, was always just one word, "she" (with the exception of the first, sixth, and ninth couplet where I wanted to highlight that each character and subject has ownership of their actions).

4. Lastly, I did not insert my own name in the last line because this poem isn't about me; it's about the agency of all women, and using "I" instead allows the reader to insert themselves into the poem.

In writing the poem, I of course, sought to honour how forms can change when you move between and through languages and cultures: this is a rich tradition of the ghazal itself, which first started in Arabia and then moved through Persia and Mughal Hindustan - in each place, the genre underwent transformation. But more importantly, I wanted to reclaim the genre through a feminist poem.

Classical ghazals are about the lover and the beloved. The narrator is male and the beloved is the female object of his desire and pursuits. I wanted to write against this idea. In this poem, the narrator is female, she has agency, and she is running away from the advances of a pursuer. On a broader note, at each turn, I wanted the reader to feel as if they didn't know what was coming, much like the narrator feels as she is running.