कोई ले लो सैयाँ

'Koi Le Lo Saiyan' is the fruit-seller's counterpart to Albeli's tooth-powder song. The pre-Partition film database pakmag.net quotes its opening as a call to buy sweet grapes from the garden and credits it to Zeenat Begum, who sings most of what survives from this score. There is a complication worth stating plainly: the mukhda pakmag quotes contains the same words that hindigeetmala.net lists as a separate Albeli song, 'Chaman Ke Angoor', so the two catalogue entries may in fact be one recording indexed twice from different fragments of the same line. Both are recorded here, with the doubt noted.

No recording of this number has been located, so its arrangement cannot be described. What can be said is what the form requires: a vendor's song has to imitate a vendor's call, which means a long held note on the item being sold and a falling line after it, repeated at walking pace so that the number can run under a scene of someone moving through a street. Chishti built the film's other hawker song exactly that way, and the two were almost certainly cut from the same cloth.

The line is an address to strangers, and its one piece of colour is the word saiyan - a term of endearment normally reserved for a lover, here thrown out to whoever is passing. That slippage is the joke and also the pathos of the vendor song: intimacy is part of the sales pitch, offered to everyone and therefore to no one. The goods are grapes from a chaman, a garden, which places the seller at the far end of a supply chain she does not own. No writer is recorded for this song in any catalogue consulted.

pakmag.net, which catalogues pre-Partition Lahore productions, records Albeli as a film begun in Lahore and finished in Calcutta and lists Zeenat Begum as its singer. Albeli (1945) was made by Talwar Productions of Calcutta and directed by the company's proprietor R. C. Talwar, who also wrote the story; J. S. Casshyap supplied the screenplay and dialogue. Shooting began in Lahore and was completed in Calcutta, and the picture opened at the Central Cinema in Bombay on 22 December 1945. The plot follows a street girl in love with a gypsy boy who is wanted by two other young women as well; Ramola headed a cast that included the actor-singer Satish, Rooplekha, Manorama, Usha, Sunder and Hiralal. G. A. Chishti composed all twelve songs, and Baburao Patel's filmindia gave the film a hostile notice in its March 1946 issue.

The song has no independent afterlife, and its main interest now is bibliographic: it is one of the two Albeli entries whose relationship to each other is still unresolved, and a small illustration of how the song lists of obscure 1940s films come down to us - assembled from record labels, censor lists and publicity, sometimes indexing the same recording twice under different opening words.