आओ आओ ऐ बाबू चली है तूफ़ान मेल

This is the first song in the Hindi Film Geet Kosh's ordering of the Pardesi Balam soundtrack, a group number picturised on a woman with chorus and built around the Toofan Mail, the express train whose name the lyric turns into an invitation: come aboard, this carriage has a gait of its own, and the person driving it is a woman in a veil. Zahir Kashmiri wrote it and Dr. Inayat Husain Qureshi set it, as he did every song in the film. No singer is recorded for the side, and no copy of the record appears to circulate today, which makes this one of the five Pardesi Balam songs that survive only as a title in a reference book.

Nothing can honestly be said about the arrangement of this recording, because no copy of it was traceable; what the Geet Kosh does establish is the shape — a lead female voice answered by chorus, the standard build of a 1940s film ensemble number. The train song was a small genre of its own in this period, with its own rhythmic logic: composers used a chugging ostinato and an accelerating refrain to imitate the engine, and audiences knew the convention well enough that a title alone signalled it. Dr. Inayat Husain Qureshi, who wrote all ten scores for this film, left almost no other documented work, so there is no body of comparable music against which to place this one.

Zahir Kashmiri takes a piece of colonial railway hardware and makes it a stage. The Toofan Mail was an actual express service, and by the mid-1940s its name had become shorthand in Urdu and Hindi verse for speed, chance and the indifference of modern life — the same figure Kanan Devi had made famous a few years earlier in Jawab (1942). Kashmiri's twist is the driver: the carriage with the extraordinary gait is being run by a ghunghatwali, a veiled woman, which is at once a stock filmi joke and a small piece of mischief from a poet of the Progressive Writers' Association. Since the lyric remains in copyright it is described here rather than quoted.

Pardesi Balam was made at Parkar Films, Lahore, directed by M. A. Mirza for Dr. Anand Prakash Parkar, with Pran among its cast during the four years he spent working in Lahore before Partition. The Geet Kosh records ten songs, all written by Zahir Kashmiri and all composed by Dr. Inayat Husain Qureshi, but assigns the film no release year at all, filing it under its undated 'Forties' heading; collector archives describe the picture as unreleased. This song opens that sequence, and like most of the film's soundtrack it is known today only from the index entry.

The song has no afterlife of its own — it was never reissued, and the myswar catalogue lists it under the short title 'Toofan Mail' with no singer and no audio. Its interest is comparative: it belongs to a run of Indian films and songs that borrowed the train's name, from Toofan Mail (1934, directed by Jayant Desai) through The Return of Toofan Mail (1942) to Son of Toofan Mail (1947), with Kanan Devi's 'Duniya Ye Duniya Toofan Mail' from Jawab (1942), composed by Kamal Dasgupta, as the best-remembered of the family.