ऐ चाँद नज़र ना लगाना

The third of Khursheed's Moorti solos is the quietest thing on the album: a night song in which the singer asks the moon, the breeze and the birds to keep still and not disturb — or worse, not to cast the evil eye on — the beloved who is sleeping. The full opening line preserved on the surviving disc extends the address to 'chand salona', the lovely moon, so that the beloved and the sky are being compared even as the sky is being warned off. It is a small, domestic, almost superstitious form of tenderness, and quite unlike the reproaches and laments that make up most of the film's music.

Slow, low and almost unaccompanied by the standards of 1945: harmonium under the voice, percussion barely present, no orchestral fill. The restraint is functional rather than decorative — a song about not making noise cannot be arranged loudly. Bulo C. Rani's Ranjit sound, which Sharad Dutt characterises as built around weighty voices and modest accompaniment, is at its most economical here, and the whole track rests on Khursheed's ability to sustain a hushed line without letting it go slack.

Nazar — the evil eye — is the hinge of the lyric, and it is worth noticing what it assumes: that the beloved is beautiful enough to be at risk simply from being looked at, and that the moon, conventionally the standard of beauty, might be jealous. Pandit Indra therefore reverses the usual compliment. Instead of saying the beloved is as lovely as the moon, he tells the moon to keep its distance, which claims more while appearing to claim less. The rest of the imagery — night breeze, birdsong, dreams — is standard, and deliberately so; the song's business is atmosphere, not argument.

Khursheed carried Moorti's music: three solos and a share of the trio out of ten songs. She had become a national name after singing opposite K.L. Saigal in Tansen (1943) and was among the last of the singing stars, the performers who acted and sang their own parts before playback separated the two trades. Moorti was a Ranjit Movietone social directed by Chaturbhuj Doshi; no print survives, and this song, like most of the film's numbers, exists now only as an audio transfer. Atul's Song A Day, posting it in October 2011, called it an extremely rare song and said no video was available.

Nothing in the historical literature records this song, and no raag attribution exists for it. What it has instead is a small circle of listeners who treat it as one of the finds of the Moorti soundtrack: Atul's Song A Day published it in October 2011 as a rare song worth hearing, and a collectors' channel included it as the tenth and last side when it uploaded the whole soundtrack in 2023. That is the modest afterlife available to a good side from a lost picture.