तेरी ज़ुल्फ़ें हैं नाग काले

Of the ten songs the Geet Kosh indexes for this film, this is the only one carrying a singer credit: Nazira Begum and Inayat Bhatti, marked as a female-male duet. myswar lists the same track — under the variant title 'Teri Zulfen Naag Hai Kaale' — with Nazira Begum's name and files it as Filmi and Punjabi folk, which fits a Lahore production. The lyric works the standard courtship conceits: the beloved's hair as black serpents, the eyes as cups of wine, and the onlooker with nowhere left to run. Zahir Kashmiri wrote it; Dr Inayat Husain Qureshi composed it.

myswar files this as Filmi and Punjabi folk, which is the most specific musical description any source gives for a Pardesi Balam song, and it is a reasonable label for a Lahore studio's courtship duet: a folk cycle carried on a firm beat, alternating male and female lines so the two voices can answer each other, and a mukhda built to come round often. Beyond that classification nothing about the arrangement is documented, and the film's composer left no other identified score.

Hair as serpents is one of the fixed images of the Urdu and Punjabi love lyric, and it is not merely decorative: the serpent is beautiful, it coils, and it is dangerous, which is exactly the double charge a courtship song wants. Pairing it with eyes as wine-cups extends the same idea into intoxication, so the two images together describe a beloved who bewitches and endangers in one motion. Kashmiri is writing to a convention here rather than against it — this is the light end of his range on this soundtrack, as far from the film's Urdu ghazals of desolation as the score travels.

Pardesi Balam was a Parkar Films production of Lahore, directed by M. A. Mirza for the producer Dr Anand Prakash Parkar, with the young Pran among a cast the Geet Kosh could only list because a collector in Karachi supplied the names decades later. All ten of its songs were written by Zahir Kashmiri and composed by Dr Inayat Husain Qureshi. No print, poster or synopsis survives, and myswar records the picture as unreleased, so the Geet Kosh's song index — first lines and a bracketed note on who sang each number on screen — is very nearly the whole of what is known about the film.

The song's documentary importance is out of proportion to anything it did commercially, because it carries the film's only Geet Kosh singer credit. Nazira Begum and Inayat Bhatti are otherwise almost invisible in the Hindi film record of the period, and a single sourced attribution like this is what keeps such names attached to any work at all. myswar independently confirms Nazira Begum on the track, which is unusual for a film this obscure — most of its songs have one source or none. The recording itself survives outside any commercial catalogue: it is the one of the film's five circulating sides that Saregama's digital reissue does not include, and it is heard today only through collectors' uploads of the disc.