रो रहा है आज कोई

Feroze Nizami trained in classical music under Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan of the Kirana gharana and came to Bombay from a singer's post at All India Radio; Piya Milan is one of only two scores credited to him in 1945, the other being Sharbati Ankhen. One of four Tanveer Naqvi lyrics on the album and one of five songs Nizami gave to Nirmala Devi. Nizami wrote this score for voices rather than for orchestration - eleven songs shared among five singers, with no chorus number among them.

The grammar of the title does the work: koi - someone, anyone - keeps the weeper unnamed, and the singer reports the grief as though overhearing it rather than owning it. Displacing one's own sorrow onto an unnamed third person is a standard move in Urdu lyric, and it lets a film song register pain without the character having to confess it aloud. Tanveer Naqvi is credited with the lyric by both catalogues.

Piya Milan (1945) was produced by Wadia Movietone and directed by S. M. Yusuf, with Motilal as the male lead and the eighteen-year-old Nirmala Devi as his leading lady. Wikipedia's list of Hindi films of 1945 classes the picture as a social, and the surviving record catalogues agree on an eleven-song album, every number composed by Feroze Nizami. No print of the film is known to circulate, so the songs and their credits are effectively all that survives of it. The song is documented in both hindigeetmala's and MySwar's track listings for the film, which agree on its singer and, where one exists, on its lyricist.

Nothing beyond the catalogue entry survives for this track: no contemporary review of it has been traced, and the film itself is lost. It is preserved here as part of the documented eleven-song record of Nizami's 1945 work.