आए दिन पिया मिलन के

Feroze Nizami trained in classical music under Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan of the Kirana gharana and came to Bombay from a singer's post at All India Radio; Piya Milan is one of only two scores credited to him in 1945, the other being Sharbati Ankhen. Nizami hands the film's title idea not to his heroine but to Zohrabai Ambalewali, by 1945 one of the most recognisable female voices in Bombay after her four solos in Naushad's Rattan (1944). She sings three of Piya Milan's eleven songs.

This is the song the film takes its name from: piya milan, union with the beloved, is stated here as an arrival rather than a hope. Tanveer Naqvi's phrasing puts the event in the plural - days, not a day - which turns a single meeting into a season, the standard way Hindi lyric marks the end of a spell of waiting.

Piya Milan (1945) was produced by Wadia Movietone and directed by S. M. Yusuf, with Motilal as the male lead and the eighteen-year-old Nirmala Devi as his leading lady. Wikipedia's list of Hindi films of 1945 classes the picture as a social, and the surviving record catalogues agree on an eleven-song album, every number composed by Feroze Nizami. No print of the film is known to circulate, so the songs and their credits are effectively all that survives of it. The song is documented in both hindigeetmala's and MySwar's track listings for the film, which agree on its singer and, where one exists, on its lyricist.

The pairing is the album's clearest historical marker: a composer trained in Kirana khayal writing for the leading gramophone voice of the mid-1940s, one year after Rattan had made film music a mass commercial product.