आज गगन में घिर घिर बादल

In Meghadutam nothing happens until the clouds gather; the yaksha's entire address is triggered by the arrival of the rains, and this song takes that single meteorological event as its subject. No singer credit survives for it in any catalogue we could consult, so the voices on the record are simply not known. Saregama's digital reissue, unhelpfully, credits the track to three character names — Yaksh, Priya and Madhumukhi — rather than to performers, which at most suggests it was picturised on more than one figure.

At 2:28 on the reissue this is one of the shortest tracks on the album — a single-idea song rather than a developed one, consistent with the compact, verse-and-refrain forms Kamal Dasgupta favoured for anything that was not a solo showpiece. The score as a whole keeps the voice forward and the accompaniment small, in the light-music manner of his Calcutta recordings rather than the fuller Bombay orchestration of 1945.

Indian poetry has treated the gathering of monsoon cloud as an emotional event rather than a weather report for as long as it has existed — the same sky that promises relief to the land promises nothing but intensified longing to anyone separated from their beloved, because the rains are the season lovers are supposed to spend together. The title places the song squarely in that tradition, and inside a Meghadutam adaptation it functions as the hinge: the cloud that is about to be pressed into service as a messenger is first simply watched, gathering.

Meghdoot was Debaki Bose's adaptation of Kalidasa's Meghadutam for Kirti Pictures, released in October 1945 with Shahu Modak and Leela Desai in the leads. Kamal Dasgupta — a composer who spent almost his whole career inside HMV's Calcutta studio rather than in Bombay — wrote the eleven documented songs, and the film's three credited lyricists, Faiyyaz Hashmi, Gauddas and Pandit Narottam Vyas, are listed together at film level in the catalogues rather than song by song.

The song had no independent life on record — it was never the number that carried the film — but it survives complete on Saregama's 2017 digital reissue of the soundtrack, which is a better fate than most 1945 Hindi film songs have had. The film itself has no circulating print.