मैं उससे करूँ प्यार

A G.M. Durrani solo, composed by Khurshid Anwar to Zia Sarhadi's lyric, and the track that carries the highest listener rating of the eight in the film's surviving catalogue. It is one of only four songs from Yateem whose singer is documented at all.

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. What the record fixes is the pairing: Durrani's light, forward Urdu-accented tenor set against Anwar's classically grounded writing.

The title is a statement rather than a plea — the speaker is not asking permission to love but reporting a fact about himself. 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. This is one of the five songs Khurshid Anwar composed for the film; Datta Korgaonkar took the other three.

Yateem sits in the stretch of Khurshid Anwar's Indian career between his first Hindi film Ishara (1943) and Parwana (1947), the last picture K.L. Saigal acted and sang in. Anwar later moved to Pakistan; among his Indian disciples were Roshan and Shankar of Shankar-Jaikishan. G.M. Durrani, meanwhile, was one of the most-recorded male playback voices of the 1940s and a stylistic model the young Mohammed Rafi openly followed.