बस आहें भरती हूँ

A sorrow song from Pandit Badri Prasad's eight-number score for K. Amarnath's 1942 Mohan Pictures drama Zevar, with words by D. N. Madhok. The title — 'I do nothing now but sigh' — names the classic viraha (separation) mood that anchored so many heroine's songs of the early 1940s, where loss is registered not in incident but in the quiet, repeated drawing of breath.

For a viraha lyric, Badri Prasad would work in a slow, sustained tempo with the harmonium holding long drone-like phrases beneath a plaintive vocal line — the early-1940s film convention for grief, drawing on the sombre evening ragas (Bhairavi, Bhupali) that the period associated with separation and remembrance.