आता है लबों पे

A female solo from Bombay Talkies' Pratima (1945), credited by the Hindi Film Geet Kosh to the actress-singer Jyoti, in which Narendra Sharma switches out of the plain Hindi of the film's other songs and into a Persianised diction of lips, morning and evening, and waiting. The opening couplet — the only part of the text that is documented — asks why a certain name keeps returning unbidden to the lips and why the waiting goes on morning and night. Hindigeetmala and MySwar credit the song to Parul Ghosh instead; this entry follows HFGK.

No recording of the number is in circulation, so its setting cannot be described from a heard performance. What the credits support is the shape of the collaboration: Arun Kumar, a singer by training before he was a composer, writing for a voice rather than for an orchestra, on a score whose documented pieces are consistently sparse in accompaniment. The song is classed slow here on the strength of its subject and its Urdu register, and that is recorded as an inference rather than as a description of the record.

Sharma's subject here is involuntariness. The song is not about deciding to love but about being unable to stop the symptom of it: the name that surfaces on the lips without permission, and the waiting that fills both halves of the day. The Urdu register is doing precise work, because that vocabulary carries with it a whole tradition of the lover as someone acted upon rather than acting. Sharma, a Hindi poet by formation, could move into that idiom when a situation demanded it, and this song is the film's evidence that he could. Only the opening couplet is documented; nothing is said here about how the poem develops after it.

The song is one of seven documented for Pratima, composed by Arun Kumar Mukherjee, until then a Bombay Talkies playback singer. The Hindi Film Geet Kosh credits it to Jyoti, who also appears in the film's cast — one of two songs it gives her — while hindigeetmala and MySwar list Parul Ghosh. The film, P. Jairaj's directorial debut, with Dilip Kumar in his second role and Swaran Lata after Rattan (1944), was released by Bombay Talkies on 14 December 1945, in the last months of Devika Rani's control of the studio. No plot summary survives, so the on-screen context of the number is unknown.

Like most of Pratima's score the song did not outlive the film, and it survives chiefly through gramophone-era listings and the small collector interest in Arun Kumar Mukherjee's brief composing career. Its value now is documentary: it shows Narendra Sharma writing in a Persianised register he is rarely credited with, and it is one of the two Pratima titles on which the Hindi Film Geet Kosh and the online song databases give different singers.