अम्बुवा पे पपीहा ये गा गया है

One of the two titles that period and later listings put at the head of the Kaise Kahoon score, 'Ambuva Pe Papiha Ye Ga Gaya Hai' is a Zeenat Begum solo composed by Pandit Amarnath to a lyric by D. N. Madhok. The title puts the song in the monsoon — the papiha calling from the mango tree — and therefore inside the oldest seasonal vocabulary of north Indian song. It was cut in 1945 for Pancholi Art Pictures' Lahore production, and it survives through its 78-rpm record rather than through the film, which is not in general circulation today.

Pandit Amarnath — born in Jalandhar in 1912 — was a leading exponent of what came to be called the Punjab school of Hindi film music, and the voice he is writing for here is his own discovery: he had found Zeenat Begum as a child around 1937. Millennium Post calls Daasi (1944) Amarnath's most successful film and 'Raaten Na Rahin Woh Bhi Na Rahen' its chartbuster, though no source reachable here names that record's singer. A seasonal lyric of this kind sits in the light semi-classical territory those composers worked in most comfortably — the register between the film song proper and the kajri and thumri from which it borrows its imagery. The recording itself is scarce enough that no detailed account of its scoring can be given here without guessing, so none is offered.

The papiha — the hawk-cuckoo, the bird the English called the brainfever bird — is not decoration in this tradition but fixed grammar. Its cry, heard from the mango grove as the rains break, is conventionally read as 'pi kahan': where is my beloved. That makes the bird the voice of the woman's own separation, saying aloud what she has not yet said. D. N. Madhok, one of the most prolific Hindi lyricists of the 1940s and a writer equally at ease in chaste Hindi and in Urdu, makes the arrival of that call the entire occasion of the song — the season has turned, the bird has said what it always says, and the listener is left to supply the rest. No lyric text is reproduced here.

Kaise Kahoon was made at Dalsukh M. Pancholi's studio in Lahore, directed by Moti B. Gidwani from a story credited to Pancholi himself, and released on 16 November 1945 with a Bombay premiere at Imperial Cinema. No plot summary of the picture survives in any accessible source, so none is given here. Zeenat Begum carries the larger share of the eleven-song score; this is among the solos most often listed as hers.

The film has effectively vanished from circulation, so the record carries whatever memory survives. This song is one of the two that period and later listings put at the head of the score, and it belongs to the last complete year of Lahore's film industry: within two years Pandit Amarnath would be dead at thirty-five, and Zeenat Begum would be at Radio Pakistan in Lahore, where she went on singing into the late 1950s.