मेरा जोबन छब दिखलाए जिया लहराए रे

The Geet Kosh marks this song as picturised on a female dancer, which makes it the film's set-piece display number: the singer catalogues her own beauty — kohl-darkened lids, sharp and languid eyes, coloured lips — and declares that her youth is on show and her heart is swaying with it. The lyric is Zahir Kashmiri's and the music Dr. Inayat Husain Qureshi's, as throughout Pardesi Balam. The Geet Kosh records no singer. Saregama's own digital reissue of the album credits the vocal to Nazira Begum, and a collector's upload of the disc names her too, though with a question mark; the credit is recorded here on the strength of the Saregama listing.

This is one of the Pardesi Balam sides that still circulates — a shellac face of about three and a half minutes, the standard length of a ten-inch 78-rpm record, which is the shape every song of this period was cut to fit. As a dancer's number it belongs to the category a 1940s music director wrote for movement rather than for reflection: a fixed metrical cycle, a returning mukhda, and antaras kept short so the choreography could carry them. Beyond that the record itself is the only evidence, and Dr. Inayat Husain Qureshi left no other documented score against which his style here could be compared.

The joban song — a woman singing her own youth into the room — is one of the oldest devices in the North Indian repertoire, older than cinema, running back through thumri and the courtesan's mehfil. What Zahir Kashmiri does with it is conventional by design: he writes in a Hindi-Braj register rather than the Urdu he uses for the film's ghazals, piling up the fixed epithets of the tradition, because the whole point of a display number is that the audience should recognise every phrase and watch the dancer instead. Placed beside the desolate Urdu ghazals elsewhere in the same score, it shows a lyricist deliberately switching languages and registers song by song.

Pardesi Balam was a Parkar Films production of Lahore, directed by M. A. Mirza, with Pran in the cast and ten songs by Zahir Kashmiri and Dr. Inayat Husain Qureshi. The Geet Kosh gives the film no release year, filing it in its undated 'Forties' section, and collectors describe it as unreleased — so a picturisation note like 'female dancer' is, in the absence of a print, one of the few surviving facts about how any of this film actually looked on screen.

The record outlived the film. Posted online in November 2016 by a collector whose note names Surjit Singh's website as its source, this side is now one of the few ways anyone can actually hear Dr. Inayat Husain Qureshi's work. That is the ordinary fate of the Lahore output of these years: the negative is gone, the trade notices were never filed, and what remains is a shellac disc that survived because somebody kept it.