बहुत दिनों के बाद मिला था

The grammar of the title is the whole of what survives, and it is unusually eloquent. 'Mila tha' — had met — is not 'mila hai'. The song is not about a reunion happening; it is about a reunion recalled from the other side of a second parting. Catalogued for Bisvi Sadi with Pannalal Ghosh as composer, with no singer and no lyricist credited and no lyric text preserved.

No recording of the number has surfaced online, so nothing can honestly be said about its scoring beyond who wrote it. What is worth knowing is the hand behind it: in 1945 Pannalal Ghosh was already the leading bansuri player in the country — he had lengthened the instrument to thirty-two inches and added the teevra-madhyam hole to make the lower-octave meend possible — and he came to Bombay film work from New Theatres in Calcutta rather than from the Bombay studio system.

Hindi and Urdu film lyricists of the 1940s used tense with real precision, and the past perfect is their instrument for a particular kind of grief: not the pain of absence but the pain of having briefly had. A song that begins 'we had met after many days' has already conceded that the meeting did not hold. The listener is placed after the fact, in the position of someone turning an event over rather than living it — which is why this construction so often carries the register of self-reproach as much as of longing. Beyond the tense, nothing about the poem is documented, and the rest of it should not be reconstructed on guesswork.

Bisvi Sadi — 'The Twentieth Century' — was produced and directed by Mohan Bhavnani for Bhavnani Productions and released in 1945, with Motilal and Nargis heading a cast that also included Mazhar Khan, Gope, Ashalata, Bhudo Advani, Navin and Majumdar. Pannalal Ghosh, the flautist who made the bansuri a Hindustani concert instrument, wrote all fifteen songs; the records went out on Columbia. Motilal, the film's male lead, was by 1945 the actor most often described as Hindi cinema's first naturalistic performer — a reputation built on Sagar Movietone socials and on Mehboob Khan's Taqdeer (1943), the film that had also given Nargis her first leading role two years before this one.

Bisvi Sadi is out of circulation and no print is known to be accessible, so the song exists today chiefly as a catalogue line in the Hindi Film Geet Kosh–derived databases. Its claim on attention is that it belongs to one of the very few complete Hindi film scores signed by Pannalal Ghosh, whose reputation otherwise rests entirely on the concert platform.