मुद्दत बाद आए हो

This is the film's best-attested song. hindigeetmala and myswar both credit it to Sunder, hindigeetmala's separate singer index for Sunder repeats the credit, and the pre-Partition database pakmag.net — which lists only one song from Zid at all — lists this one, again with Sunder as singer. pakmag.net, however, gives its poet as Kidar Sharma, a name that appears in neither of the other catalogues. The conflict is recorded rather than resolved, and the lyricist field is left empty. A collector upload on YouTube further describes the track as a duet, which no catalogue does.

The arrangement is not documented. What the record supports is that this was the number the film's own publicity apparatus and the later catalogues treated as its principal song — the one entry that made it into a third archive and into a digitised upload — which usually indicates the score's main melody rather than a situational filler.

'Muddat baad aaye ho' — you have come after an age — is a greeting with a bill attached. The Urdu word muddat does not measure time neutrally; it means a duration long enough to have been endured, so the line welcomes and reproaches in the same breath. It is the standard opening of the reunion song, where the joy of the arrival cannot be expressed without first accounting for the length of the absence.

Zid was made in Calcutta for Shree Bharatlaxmi Pictures and directed by H. S. Rawail, who also photographed it — his second film, and the middle of the three failures that preceded Patanga (1949). Sunder, credited with this vocal, was in the cast alongside Ramola, Hiralal, Zahur Shah, Ajit, Ramesh Sinha, Manorama and Balkrishna.

It is the song by which Zid is indexed in more than one archive, and one of the two that reached YouTube, which makes it the film's de facto representative track. It is also the point at which the film's credit record visibly contradicts itself, since the one extra source that mentions it brings a lyricist name nobody else has.