हँसने वालों को रुलाओगे ये मालूम न था

The female solo of Din Raat (1945) and the first of the film's songs to resurface online, documented in December 2013. Snehprabha Pradhan — the film's leading lady, who was also a trained singer and recorded her own numbers — delivers a betrayal lament built entirely on the gap between what the speaker expected of her lover and what he turned out to be. It is the emotional counterweight to the film's celebratory youth song, and the only place in the surviving Din Raat audio where the register drops to open grief.

Chandekar sets the lament slow and sparse, letting the harmonium hold long sustained notes under the voice while the tabla keeps a subdued, unhurried cycle — the arrangement of a theatre composer who knows that a grief song is damaged by busy accompaniment. The melody climbs on the opening line and settles back down at the end of each couplet, so that every verse enacts a small rise and collapse. The surviving transfer is rough, with heavy surface noise, and the upper reaches of the voice are audibly worn by the recording rather than by the singer.

Santokh Nadim's lyric is organised around a single reversal, stated in the title and then re-proved in every stanza: the speaker did not know that the person who made her laugh was capable of making her cry. Each antara supplies a fresh instance of the same discovery — sleep and peace departing with him, the moonlit nights and the talk of love ending together, the world made into a spectacle of her humiliation. The last movement is the sharpest, because the speaker concedes her own faults in order to make the accusation land: she may be full of failings, but he was supposed to be the good one. Nothing here is ornamental; the vocabulary is domestic and unliterary, which is precisely what gives the reproach its force.

Din Raat was a Navyug Chitrapat social directed by Shori Daulatavi, with Snehprabha Pradhan and Paresh Bannerjee heading a cast that also included Sulochana Chatterjee, Vasant Thengdi, Feroza and Dar Kashmiri. Whether this lament belongs to a betrayal in the plot or to a misunderstanding later resolved cannot be established — no print survives and no synopsis has been recovered. When the recording was posted online in 2013 the blogger was uncertain whether the singing Snehprabha Pradhan was the same person as the acting Snehprabha Pradhan; the film historian Arunkumar Deshmukh replied the same day that there had only ever been one, an actress-singer.

This was the song that brought Din Raat back into circulation. Posted in December 2013 with lyrics transcribed by a reader, it was the first of the film's eight numbers to be documented online, and the comment thread beneath it produced two of the few hard facts now known about the production: that its director was not Roop K. Shorey but Shori Daulatavi, and that Snehprabha Pradhan the singer and Snehprabha Pradhan the actress were one woman. Ten years later three more songs followed. The film itself has still not been found.