दिल जला के बुझा ली जवानी

No print of Moorti survives and not one of its ten songs can be placed in the story; the blogger who posted this one in 2011 could only infer, from the fact that Khursheed was the film's heroine, that it must have been staged on her — the same inference he made about her other solos. What is not in doubt is that this is the album's most unrelieved track. Where the sawan and koel songs place their grief inside a season, this one has no landscape at all — only the flat, ruinous image of the title.

Bulo C. Rani sets it slow and low, in the register where Khursheed's voice carries most weight, and keeps the accompaniment out of the way — harmonium, a sarangi line, restrained percussion. Sharad Dutt's observation that the composer had a fascination for heavy voices is most audible in a track like this, where nothing decorative is offered and the whole effect depends on the singer being able to hold a long, unhurried line without the orchestra doing any of the work.

The verb in the title does the work: jawani is not lost or taken, it is put out, extinguished — and the fuel used to extinguish it is the speaker's own burning heart. That is a harder image than the conventional film-lyric complaint, because it makes the sufferer the agent of her own waste. Pandit Indra's second line, as it comes down on the disc, turns the song towards narration — this is my story, told in tears — which is a formula, but one that here reads as the exhausted flatness of someone who has finished arguing.

Khursheed was the heroine of Moorti and sang for herself, as singing stars still did in 1945; that this song was staged on her is an inference drawn by a 2011 blog post from her billing, not a detail preserved in any reference work. The film was a Ranjit Movietone production directed by Chaturbhuj Doshi, made in a studio where the composer, the lyricist and much of the cast were all on the house payroll. Three years later Khursheed left for Karachi and stopped performing, so the Moorti solos sit near the end of a recording career that had run since the mid-1930s.

The song has no presence in the historical literature — no raag attribution, no mention in the surveys of Bulo C. Rani's work — and survives purely through collectors' transfers of the original disc. Its interest is that it is one of Khursheed's three solos on a soundtrack she otherwise dominates, and the bleakest thing on it.