आज हँस हँस के दो दो बातें की हैं सनम ने हमारे

The most widely noticed song of the film and the only one from it that later surveys of 1945 single out. Suraiya and Hamida Banu sing it as a fast, happy duet; there is also a slower solo version by Suraiya alone. The title reports a very small event — today the beloved laughed and said two words to me — and treats it as an occasion. No print of the film is known to survive, so the song exists only as audio and its picturisation is nowhere documented. The collector who transcribed the recording noted that he could not be certain which character mimes Hamida Banu's voice on screen.

The number exists in two distinct recordings — a brisk, cheerful duet by Suraiya and Hamida Banu and a slower, sadder Suraiya solo. Running one tune twice at opposite emotional temperatures was standard mid-forties practice: the happy take marks the moment a hope is formed, the sad take the moment it collapses, and the audience recognises the second because it has already learned the first. In this, the faster take, the tempo does the work: the two voices trade phrases quickly enough that the effect is of shared excitement rather than of a statement being made. Ninu Majumdar was a classically schooled composer — a son of the silent-film producer Nagendra Mazumdar and a pupil of Ustad Faiyaz Khan — who described his aim in film music as bringing a classical touch to it by borrowing from the old masters. The compiler of the one retrospective survey to rank the song wrote, eighty years on, that the duet is ‘perhaps better known’ of the two versions.

Madhok's conceit is deflationary and therefore charming: the singer has been given nothing — no promise, no meeting, no gift — only do do baatein, two or three words, and those said in passing and with a laugh. The song then behaves as though something enormous had happened. This is a recognisable register in 1940s Hindi film lyric, the song of the disproportionate small joy, and it works because the listener supplies the disproportion: everyone knows what it is to build a day on a remark. Putting it in two voices doubles the effect — the happiness is not merely felt, it is reported to a friend, which is how such happiness usually reaches the world.

Mai Kya Karun was made at Flora Films, Bombay, directed by Sudhir Sen, and turns on a childhood marriage that two quarrelling fathers annulled in practice but never in fact: the grown children meet years later as strangers, the heroine (Suraiya) holding back because she has been raised to believe she is a child widow. The picture is finally a comedy of misunderstandings between four young people — the hero, the heroine, the hero's sister and the hero's friend — and a duet of this kind belongs to the phase before the misunderstandings start. Which characters perform it is not recorded; the collector who catalogued the song explicitly asked readers who might know.

This is the song that carried Mai Kya Karun into the retrospective record. Songs of Yore's year-end survey of 1945 listed it among the year's memorable songs, crediting both the Hamida Banu–Suraiya duet and the Suraiya solo, and placed the solo among the ten best female solos of 1945 — a list otherwise dominated by Noor Jehan and Amirbai Karnataki. For a film whose print is not known to be in circulation and a banner that left little other trace, that is the whole of its afterlife, and it rests on this tune.