बदनाम न कर दें मुझे अरमान वफ़ा के

The only Neelam song for which a male singer is named, and the singer is Khan Mastana himself — the film's composer, who had begun his career as a playback voice and habitually recorded his own compositions. The full title preserved in the myswar catalogue makes the thought explicit: it is the yearnings of fidelity themselves that threaten to bring the speaker into disrepute.

Khan Mastana's own singing voice was known in the trade by the phrase shehad jharti aawaz — a voice with honey dripping from it — and the songs he kept for himself tend to be the slow, ghazal-shaped ones that reward that quality. Composers who sing their own work usually write to the seams of their own range rather than to an abstract ideal line, and a title of this length and metrical weight implies exactly that: an unhurried tempo, a long melodic phrase carried in one breath, and accompaniment kept far enough back that the words stay audible.

The line turns a familiar Urdu figure inside out. Ordinarily the lover fears badnami — public disgrace — as something inflicted from outside: by gossip, by the rival, by the beloved's carelessness. Hunar shifts the danger inward. It is armaan-e-wafa, the desire to keep faith, that will expose him, because in a world that reads open devotion as scandal, constancy is precisely the thing that cannot be kept private. That inversion also makes the song usable inside a 'Social' picture, where the pressure on a couple usually comes from family and neighbourhood rather than from a rival, and where being seen to love the wrong person is the whole plot.

Neelam (1945) was a social picture from A. H. Productions, Bombay, directed by Ahmed Essa, with all nine songs written by C. M. Hunar and composed by Khan Mastana. The cast was led by Harish and Meena, with Jagdish Sethi, Yashodhara Katju, Kanhaiyalal, Kalyani, Satyarani, Mehdi Raza, Sayani and Abdul Hussain in support. No plot summary of the film survives anywhere, and no print is known to circulate; the songs were issued on the indigenous Young India label rather than on HMV, and it is those shellac discs that carried the film's music into the present.

No audio of this song has been located, and it was not among the two Neelam recordings a collector put online around 2018. Its documentary interest lies in the credit itself: it is a late instance of Khan Mastana singing his own composition, some seven years before the Hyderabad absence that cost him his Bombay work and set him on the road to the poverty in which he died in 1972. Very little of his 1940s work as composer-singer has been reissued, so entries like this one are largely how it is still counted.