تمہیں دل میں رکھا تھا
تم ذرا سا دل ہی رکھ لیتے

Here’s a couplet to touch your heart.
arz hai:

tumheñ dil meñ rakhā thā
tum zarā sa dil hi rakh lete

The language is simple and conversational.
An attempt to translate the idioms:

I held you close in my heart
You could have at least spared my feelings

The brilliance of these two lines lies in the interplay between two everyday expressions built around the word dil:
dil meñ rakhnā means to hold someone dear, to keep someone in your heart, to cherish them.
dil rakhnā, on the other hand, asks for something much smaller: to show basic consideration, to spare someone’s feelings out of courtesy. It’s the kind of dil rakhnā you might do by pretending to enjoy a poorly cooked meal rather than hurting your host’s feelings.

This asymmetric pair of idioms reflects the heartache. The speaker isn’t asking for equal love. It is a softer complaint: “Even if you couldn’t have loved me back, you could have at least offered basic kindness instead of cold indifference.”

This verse is often attributed to Jaun Elia on social media, and it’s easy to see why. Its direct, conversational register, combined with its understated bitterness, certainly sounds Jaun-like. But we can be fairly sure it isn’t his, because it is out of meter (behr). Jaun Elia was an iconoclast in temperament and themes, but he was rigorous with Urdu prosody (urūz), and would not let it slip. Also, this couplet does not appear on reliable archives such as Rekhta.

Even so, the verse is exceptional because of its semantic balance and emotional weight.