झूम रही बागों में भीगी हुई डालियाँ

The one duet in Yateem's surviving catalogue, sung by G.M. Durrani and Rajkumari to Khurshid Anwar's composition and Zia Sarhadi's lyric. Both catalogues that record the film agree on the pairing, which makes it among the better-attested credits in the score.

No commercially reissued recording of this track has been located, so its melody and arrangement are not described here from listening. Khurshid Anwar, who composed five of Yateem's eight songs, came to films from All India Radio Delhi, where he had been Programme Producer (Music) from 1939, and from formal training under Khansahib Tawakkal Hussain begun in 1934; Naushad publicly rated him among the finest composers in the subcontinent.

The title works entirely through the monsoon image that Hindi and Urdu film poetry had already made a fixed carrier of romantic feeling: rain-wet branches swaying (jhoom) in a garden, movement standing in for a mood the singers do not have to name. Zia Sarhadi wrote the lyric. Unusually for a director, he was a practising film lyricist in his own right — credited with the words for Kokila (1937), Hum Tum Aur Woh (1938), Teen Sau Din Ke Baad (1938), Ladies Only (1939), Sajani (1940) and later Anokha Pyar (1948) — so on Yateem he was writing the songs of a picture he was himself directing. No lyrics are reproduced here.

Yateem (1945) was directed by Zia Sarhadi at Central Studios, Bombay, produced by C.L. Divan and photographed by Keki Mistry, with Yakub, Chandraprabha, Lalita Pawar, David Abraham, Bhudo Advani and the young Suraiya in the cast. No plot summary for the film survives in the accessible record; the title, Urdu for 'orphan', is the only clue to its subject. Durrani and Rajkumari are the only two singers named anywhere in the film's credits; between them they account for four of the eight tracks, and this is the single song on which they appear together.

Rajkumari was among the busiest female playback voices of the 1940s, working steadily through the decade before the Lata Mangeshkar era reshaped the field; her best-remembered later work is on Mahal (1949). G.M. Durrani's career ran in parallel on the male side. A duet between them in 1945 is an unremarkable pairing for the year — which is precisely what makes it useful evidence of how routine studio song assignment worked at Central Studios.