XI-XLVIX

So alien I am in West and East,
No confidants true I have the least.
To heart I’m telling my sorrowful mood,
To cheat my solitude, like child I brood.¹

1.         This is Iqbal’s soliloquy to himself, when he is feeling himself alone without alter egos (friends) to have a tete-a-tete talk. Here alien means lonely.
(Soliloquy; talk to one’s self.)