पंछी आयो जो इस बार

'Panchhi Aayo Jo Is Baar' is one of two bird songs in Ramchandra Pal's score for Nal Damyanti (1945), with words by the lyricist credited as Lakshman. The title — a conditional about the bird's arrival 'this time' — belongs to the sandesh or messenger convention that the Nala-Damayanti legend itself is built on: in the Mahabharata's Nalopakhyana the lovers know each other only through a golden swan that flies between Nishadha and Vidarbha. No singer is credited for the song in the surviving catalogues.

Ramchandra Pal's documented manner — north Indian melody carried on a Western-influenced ensemble, an approach he had established at Bombay Talkies — is all that can honestly be said about how this song was scored, since the recording is not in circulation. What is documented is the reception: Filmindia's reviewer in July 1945 held that not one song in the film sat properly on its dramatic situation, a complaint aimed at the score's fit rather than at its craft.

Hindi and Braj love poetry has a long-standing grammar for the bird as bearer of news: the papiha whose call is unbearable to the separated, the crow whose perch on the roof announces a visitor, the swan who carries a message between courts. A title framed as 'if the bird comes this time' works inside that grammar — it makes the beloved's news contingent on a creature nobody controls, which is exactly the emotional condition of viraha, waiting without agency. In a film of the Nalopakhyana the figure is not a metaphor at all: the swan is a character.

In the legend the golden swan is the first contact between Nala and Damayanti, carrying an account of each to the other and setting up her choice of him at the swayamvara. Janak Pictures staged the bird as a physical prop; Filmindia's reviewer, who disliked almost everything about the picture, singled it out for looking lifeless. Shobhana Samarth played Damayanti and Prithviraj Kapoor played Nala.

Neither this song nor the rest of the Nal Damyanti score entered the gramophone repertoire that carried 1945's better-known music forward, and no recording of it is in general circulation. Its value now is documentary: it is one of eight titles that preserve the shape of a lost score.