आज हँस हँस के दो दो बातें (एकल संस्करण)

The sad companion to the film's best-known duet: Suraiya alone, singing the same D. N. Madhok lyric at a slower tempo and in a lower emotional key. Song catalogues list it separately, usually tagged 'Version 2'. Songs of Yore's retrospective survey of 1945 placed this solo among the ten best female solos of the year, its compiler remarking that he had not previously heard of the film at all. No print of the film is known to survive, so the song exists only as audio and its picturisation is nowhere documented.

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. The slow take is where Suraiya's voice at sixteen is most exposed — light, forward, with very little of the trained heaviness her older contemporaries used — and the reduction of tempo turns the lyric's small event into something being remembered rather than something happening. 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. Reviewers who know both versions describe the duet as the better known and this one as the finer piece of singing.

The lyric is unchanged, which is precisely what makes the pair interesting: the same report of the same trivial kindness — the beloved laughed and said two words — reads as delight at one tempo and as loss at another. Nothing in Madhok's line commits it to either. That neutrality is a craft decision, and it is what allows a mid-forties film to get two situations out of one composition: the words describe the event, and the arrangement supplies the verdict on it. In the slow version the phrase 'aaj' — today — stops meaning 'at last' and starts meaning 'only today'.

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. A film whose heroine spends most of its length refusing what she wants needs exactly this kind of doubled song, and a slowed reprise is the standard way mid-forties Hindi cinema showed a reversal without new dialogue. Where the two versions actually fall in the running order is not recorded.

This solo is the single piece of Mai Kya Karun that has entered any considered list of 1945: Songs of Yore, whose year-by-year surveys are the most-cited amateur canon of pre-1950 Hindi film music, ranked it in the year's ten best female solos beside recordings by Noor Jehan and Amirbai Karnataki. In a year when Suraiya was sixteen and not yet a star, that placement is the strongest surviving evidence of how good she already was.