अब याद तेरी लेके जिएँ

A Hamida Banu solo from Nagma-e-Sahra (1945), words by Ehsan Rizvi, music by C. Ramchandra. It is the one song of the seven that hindigeetmala's page for the film omits altogether; it appears only in the BollySwar-derived myswar listing, which is why the film's full song count is seven rather than six.

The disc has not been located and the arrangement is undocumented. The credit places it as the second of Hamida Banu's two solos on the score, alongside 'Bichhdi Hui Bahaar', with which it shares a subject.

The line turns on leke — 'taking', 'carrying'. Memory here is not something that happens to the speaker but something she picks up and goes on with, which changes the whole posture of the song: this is not the lament of separation but the settlement afterwards, the decision about how to live with it. Ab, 'now', does the same work at the front of the line, marking a before and an after. Ehsan Rizvi is writing consolation rather than complaint — a distinction the Urdu film lyric of the 1940s made often and made carefully.

The film was Bhagwan Dada's own production for Jagriti Pictures, premiered in Bombay on 22 December 1945. Hamida Banu, born in Lahore in 1928 and recommended to C. Ramchandra by Bhagwan himself, sings four of its seven documented songs — the largest share by a distance, and an indication that the heroine's musical role was written around her rather than around a star name the production could not have afforded.

Absent from hindigeetmala and unavailable in any reissue, this song exists in exactly one place — the BollySwar/myswar catalogue derived from the Hindi Film Geet Kosh. It is a useful reminder of how thin the record of 1945's small productions is: one database dropping one line is the difference between a six-song film and a seven-song one.