अब कोई आरज़ू नहीं अब कोई आसरा नहीं

The Geet Kosh marks this as a female number and its opening couplet sets out a state of total exhaustion: desire gone, support gone, and then a turn upward to ask the heavens which grief they have failed to send. It is one of the two Urdu ghazals in a score that otherwise moves through folk duets, a dancer's number and a bhajan. The Geet Kosh leaves the singer column blank here, as it does for nine of this film's ten songs, and the two record-based catalogues disagree about who sang it: myswar names Dilshad Begum, Saregama's own digital reissue names Munawar Sultana. With the sources in direct conflict, no singer is recorded here.

A film ghazal of the mid-1940s was a compressed thing: two or three couplets had to fit one face of a ten-inch 78-rpm disc, roughly three and a half minutes, which is why the form as it reached the cinema kept the ghazal's couplet structure and its returning refrain but dropped the long improvisation of the concert version. That constraint, rather than any surviving description of the arrangement, is what can be said with confidence about how this recording was shaped. Dr Inayat Husain Qureshi's score for the film has no other documented example of the form to compare it with.

The move the opening makes — first the inventory of loss, then the address to the sky — is one of the oldest in Urdu poetry, and Zahir Kashmiri uses it without ornament. What gives the couplet its edge is that the question is rhetorical and bitter rather than pleading: the speaker is not asking for relief but pointing out that the heavens have already run out of new sorrows to inflict. Kashmiri was a Progressive Writers' Association poet, and that habit of turning a private complaint outward into an accusation is recognisably of that school, though nothing here is political on its face.

Pardesi Balam was a Parkar Films production of Lahore, directed by M. A. Mirza for the producer Dr Anand Prakash Parkar, with the young Pran among a cast the Geet Kosh could only list because a collector in Karachi supplied the names decades later. All ten of its songs were written by Zahir Kashmiri and composed by Dr Inayat Husain Qureshi. No print, poster or synopsis survives, and myswar records the picture as unreleased, so the Geet Kosh's song index — first lines and a bracketed note on who sang each number on screen — is very nearly the whole of what is known about the film.

This is one of the four Pardesi Balam sides that Saregama reissued digitally as a short album, which makes it among the best-documented songs of a film that otherwise survives only on paper — and it is precisely that documentation which exposes how unreliable the record is at this depth, since myswar and Saregama print different singers for the same three-and-a-half minutes of shellac. Beyond the reissue the song has no afterlife: no anthology, no cover, no contemporary notice.