Evoking the longing for revolution in words that could have been addressed to a beloved, the Marxist Urdu poet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, inscribes revolutionary struggles with a sense of time that is at once immanent and transcendent. In other words, while specific people rebel in specific historical contexts and circumstances, they hope to transcend that history and bring in a new future. It is this time-consciousness that defeats failure, for, as Faiz reminds us, even defeat carries within it the seeds of another rebirth. Making a revolution was, for Faiz, an act of love that might end in loss (hence, dreams that have died on “your lips”) and a striving for authentic life that simultaneously united “lovers” in the present and across history — so long as injustice remained intact. Faiz wrote this couplet in 1975, and I read it here as the determined recognition of a generation who, having defeated the colonial rulers, must now reckon with postcolonial “national” elites passing off their class interests as those of the nation — a nation that, by 1975, was partitioned into three countries.