आँख मिला के बलमा मत आँख चुराना

A Suraiya solo from Mai Kya Karun (1945), written by D. N. Madhok and composed by Ninu Majumdar. The title carries the whole argument: having met her eyes, the balma — the beloved — must not now steal his gaze away. HindiGeetMala files the number in the short form 'Aankh Mila Ke'; collectors index it by the fuller first line. No print of the film is known to survive, so the song exists only as audio and its picturisation is nowhere documented. The collector who catalogued it notes that, on the strength of the cast list, it was almost certainly filmed on Suraiya herself.

Ninu Majumdar was a classically schooled composer — a son of the silent-film producer Nagendra Mazumdar and a pupil of Ustad Faiyaz Khan — who described his aim in film music as bringing a classical touch to it by borrowing from the old masters. His Mai Kya Karun songs sit in the light-classical register that mid-forties Bombay reserved for the heroine's reflective numbers — an unhurried single melodic line kept in the middle of the voice, a small ensemble of harmonium, strings and light percussion behind it, and short instrumental passages between the antaras in place of a full orchestral prelude. Suraiya's voice at sixteen was light and forward-placed, closer to the speaking register than the trained weight of contemporaries like Zohrabai Ambalewali or Amirbai Karnataki, and it suits a lyric of quiet complaint far better than one of display.

The song belongs to the most durable convention in Hindi-Urdu film lyric: the exchanged glance as a binding act. In this poetic grammar aankh milana — to meet eyes — is not a casual social event but something close to a contract, and its opposite, aankh churana, to steal one's eyes away, is a breach of it. Madhok sets the two verbs against each other inside a single line, so that the obligation and the offence are stated together, and the singer's position is therefore not that of a supplicant but of someone claiming what has already been conceded. Madhok had been writing Hindi film lyrics for more than a decade by 1945 and worked characteristically in this plain, idiom-driven Hindustani rather than in high Urdu — one reason his songs of the period travelled so easily on gramophone.

Mai Kya Karun was made at Flora Films, Bombay, directed by Sudhir Sen, and turns on a childhood marriage that two quarrelling fathers annulled in practice but never in fact: the grown children meet years later as strangers, the heroine (Suraiya) holding back because she has been raised to believe she is a child widow. A reproach about eyes met and then avoided sits naturally inside that predicament — a heroine who keeps refusing what she wants — but the song's exact place in the narrative is not recorded anywhere. Suraiya sings five of the score's eight recordings, three of them solos, of which this is one.

In 1945 Suraiya was sixteen and had a busy year — Phool, Tadbir, Samrat Chandragupta and this film among others — but she was not yet the singing star she became: the year's female-vocal honours in retrospective surveys go to Noor Jehan and Amirbai Karnataki. The run of pictures that made her the highest-paid actress-singer in India — Dard (1947), Pyar Ki Jeet (1948), Badi Behen (1949) — was still ahead. That is what gives this modest solo its interest now: it is the sound of a major voice before anybody had decided it was one.