परदेसी मोरे नींद चुराये

The second Nirmala Devi–Khan Mastana duet on the album, and the one whose title reaches furthest back into the traditional repertoire. 'Pardesi' — the man from elsewhere, the one who has gone away or who does not belong here — and stolen sleep are two of the fixed figures of viraha, the poetry of separation that runs through thumri, kajri and the folk song of the Hindi belt. Casting it as a duet rather than a woman's solo is the interesting choice: the complaint is conventionally hers alone, and putting a male voice opposite her changes it from a lament into an exchange.

No recording is in circulation, so nothing can be claimed about how this particular number was set. What is documented is Gobind Ram's manner in these years: light melodic writing with a ghazal and thumri inflection rather than a distinctly Punjabi folk one, a small orchestra built around harmonium, sarangi and tabla, and tunes pitched to sit comfortably in the middle of a classically trained voice instead of stretching it. The viraha register in film music of these years usually meant a slow to medium cycle, sarangi shadowing the voice, and long held notes at the ends of lines; whether Gobind Ram wrote it that way here is not verifiable without the record.

Sleep is the standard measure of damage in this poetry. A woman does not say she is unhappy; she says she cannot sleep, and the listener is expected to do the arithmetic. The theft metaphor — he stole it, she did not lose it — assigns blame without accusation, which is precisely the tone the tradition wants: reproach that leaves the door open. 'More' rather than 'meri' keeps the diction in the Braj-Awadhi register of folk and thumri lyric, the same register as 'Ganga Kinaare More Sasur Ji Ka' elsewhere on this album, which suggests Pandit Indra was writing a consistent rural voice for this character across the film. The words themselves are not reproduced here.

Chalis Karod — 'Forty Crores', the number that stood through the 1940s for the population of undivided India — was directed by Nanabhai Bhatt for Chandra Art Productions of Bombay, a year before Bhatt set up his own Deepak Pictures. Gobind Ram composed, Pandit Indra and I. C. Kapoor were credited with the songs, and the cast paired Nirmala Devi with her husband Arun Kumar Ahuja alongside Yakub, Agha and Gope. No plot summary of the film survives in any source consulted for this entry, so the nine song titles are effectively all that remains of what the picture was about. Khan Mastana sings opposite both female leads of the album — Zohrabai Ambalewali once and Nirmala Devi twice — which made him, in effect, the male voice of the entire film.

The song has left no trace beyond its catalogue line. What it marks is the moment when a classically trained singer of thumri and kajri was being asked to bring that vocabulary onto a film soundtrack and share it with a male playback voice — a hybrid that would be entirely routine within a decade and was still being worked out in 1945. Nothing of the recording is in general circulation today: there is no known commercial reissue and no print of the film in public availability. Its survival is documentary — a line in the Hindi Geet Mala catalogue and the Cinemaazi credit sheet — which is the ordinary fate of most of the roughly two hundred Hindi films released each year in the mid-1940s.