कुछ दिन बीते इस धरती पर

A three-minute-eight-second solo for Renuka Devi, and the single song on Ghulami credited to Akhtar-ul-Iman. The title reads as a reckoning with time spent on this earth — a few days passed, and then what — which is a characteristic opening for a poet whose mature work is largely about erosion, distance and what a life adds up to. It is among his earliest film credits: he had arrived at Shalimar Pictures in Poona only the year before, brought there by Josh Malihabadi.

Pal sets it slow and short — 3:08, the second-briefest track on the album — which is the right shape for a reflective lyric that has to make its point inside one side of a 78. Renuka Devi carries it alone, without chorus or answering voice, and the arrangement of such a number in 1945 was deliberately sparse: a reflective song is undermined by density, and the composer's job is to keep the accompaniment from competing with a text the audience is meant to follow line by line.

Akhtar-ul-Iman went on to become one of the most respected practitioners of the modern Urdu nazm — a poet who abandoned the ghazal's couplet symmetry for long, argued, unsentimental poems about isolation and the passage of time. That sensibility is already legible in a title that starts by counting days rather than declaring feeling. In a film soundtrack of 1945 this was an unusual thing to be given: the film lyric of the period ran on immediate emotion, and a reflective, time-measuring opening asks the listener to think before it asks them to feel.

Akhtar-ul-Iman met Josh Malihabadi at a mushaira in Hyderabad in 1944; Josh, then working as a lyricist at Shalimar Pictures, took him to Poona, where he joined the studio's story department and wrote screenplays and dialogue for W. Z. Ahmed's productions. Ghulami, released in 1945 and directed by Mohan Wadhwani, falls exactly in that window, and this is his lyric on it. He moved to Filmistan Studio as a dialogue writer soon after, beginning a long parallel career in Hindi cinema. The film's own plot is not documented, so the scene this song served is unknown.

Akhtar-ul-Iman is remembered chiefly as a poet and as the screenwriter of films including Waqt, Gumrah and Dharmputra, and his song-writing credits are correspondingly few and little examined. That makes this recording, obscure as it is, a real data point: a documented early lyric from the months when he first entered the industry, preserved because HMV kept the Ghulami masters and Saregama reissued them. The film has vanished; the credit line has not.