आते नहीं हैं वो क्या हम उन्हें याद आते हैं

The title asks a rhetorical question — he does not come; do I even cross his mind? — and it is the only song of Zid (1945) that myswar bothers to classify, filing it as Filmi and Ghazal where every other track in the album is marked 'Unknown'. Neither myswar nor hindigeetmala names a singer for it. Two collector uploads on YouTube are indexed against the film and credit the song to two different women, Parul Ghosh in one and Radha Rani in the other. A video title is not a credit and the two cancel each other out, so the singer field here is left empty rather than filled with a coin-toss.

G. A. Chishti composed it, and the one piece of documented classification — myswar's 'Ghazal' tag — is the only honest guide to its manner. In a 1945 Hindi film score that label implies a slow, unhurried metre, a melody that unfolds couplet by couplet rather than in a repeating refrain, and the harmonium-and-strings accompaniment Chishti favoured for serious numbers. Beyond that inference nothing about the arrangement is documented and nothing is asserted.

The line is built on a reversal that Urdu-Hindi film poetry uses constantly: the speaker does not complain that the beloved is absent, but asks whether the beloved's memory contains the speaker at all. The grievance is shifted from the body to the mind — not 'you do not come' but 'am I remembered?' — which is a smaller, more wounded question than an accusation, and it lets the line end in doubt instead of anger. Only the title survives in the catalogues; the rest of the lyric is not reproduced here, and is not known.

Zid was H. S. Rawail's second film as director, shot by Rawail himself in Calcutta for Shree Bharatlaxmi Pictures, with Ramola — his Shukriya (1944) lead — heading the cast. Six of the film's eight songs are credited to Sunder, an actor in the cast; this is one of the two that are not, and the absence of a name beside a song with a woman's voice on the surviving uploads is precisely the gap the catalogues never closed.

Of the eight Zid songs this is the only one with any continuing life: it is the track collectors chose to digitise, and the reason a 1945 commercial failure is audible at all today. That afterlife is also the source of its central problem, since the uploads that preserved it are the same ones that disagree about its singer.