काहे मन बेचैन सजनी

The second of Asit Baran's songs in Wasiyatnama and the other of the two numbers from the film that Songs of Yore listed among the memorable songs of 1945. Both hindigeetmala and MySwar credit it to him as a solo.

A slow, inward song set for a single male voice — the introspective register Boral had been writing for actor-singers at New Theatres since the Saigal years, where the melody stays close to speech and the weight falls on the word rather than on ornament.

The line is a question put to the beloved — sajni — about the singer's own mind: not 'why do you trouble me' but 'why is my heart restless'. Addressing the woman while interrogating himself is the small poetic turn here, and it fits a story in which the disturbance in the household is real long before anyone is willing to say what causes it.

Wasiyatnama was made at New Theatres, Calcutta, directed by Soumyen Mukherjee, and is the studio's Hindi telling of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay's 1878 Bengali novel Krishnakanter Uil — a household destroyed by a tampered will and a widow's forbidden attachment. R.C. Boral composed the six songs and Munshi Zakir Hussain wrote all of them, the same lyricist-composer pairing New Theatres used that year on Bimal Roy's Hamrahi. No print of the film is known to be in circulation; the songs survive on record.

Its survival is entirely on paper and shellac: it holds a place in Songs of Yore's memorable-songs list for 1945 but, unlike four of its companions on the soundtrack, it has not been among the Wasiyatnama songs posted and discussed online by Atul's Song A Day.