आ आ आई अहा होली आई

The film's Holi song, composed by Khurshid Anwar with words by Zia Sarhadi. The singer of this track is not recorded in either of the two surviving song catalogues for the film, and no name is guessed here.

No commercially reissued recording of this track has been located, so its melody and arrangement are not described here from listening. Khurshid Anwar, who composed five of Yateem's eight songs, came to films from All India Radio Delhi, where he had been Programme Producer (Music) from 1939, and from formal training under Khansahib Tawakkal Hussain begun in 1934; Naushad publicly rated him among the finest composers in the subcontinent.

The title is built almost entirely of arrival — a run of open vowels and an exclamation before the announcement that Holi has come. Holi songs in this period functioned as licensed disorder inside otherwise decorous narratives: the one sequence where colour, crowd and direct address to the audience were all permitted at once. Zia Sarhadi wrote the lyric. Unusually for a director, he was a practising film lyricist in his own right — credited with the words for Kokila (1937), Hum Tum Aur Woh (1938), Teen Sau Din Ke Baad (1938), Ladies Only (1939), Sajani (1940) and later Anokha Pyar (1948) — so on Yateem he was writing the songs of a picture he was himself directing. No lyrics are reproduced here.

Yateem (1945) was directed by Zia Sarhadi at Central Studios, Bombay, produced by C.L. Divan and photographed by Keki Mistry, with Yakub, Chandraprabha, Lalita Pawar, David Abraham, Bhudo Advani and the young Suraiya in the cast. No plot summary for the film survives in the accessible record; the title, Urdu for 'orphan', is the only clue to its subject. It is one of Khurshid Anwar's five songs for the film.

The Hindi film Holi song is one of the few song-types with an unbroken line from the 1930s to the present, and Yateem's contribution belongs to the stretch of that line that is now largely inaudible — catalogued by title, unattributed as to voice, with no reissued recording located. It is a reminder of how much of the 1940s soundtrack survives only as a list.