बिल्ली की तरह वो दबे पाँव चली रे

'Billi Ki Tarah Woh Dabe Paanv Chali Re' is the comic number of Bachpan's score, and it is the one song in the film whose title is built on a visual gag: someone creeping along on soft feet, watched and reported on by the singer. The film had a comedian in the cast, credited simply as Dixit, though nothing connects him to this particular song in any source. S. N. Tripathi composed it to I. C. Kapoor's lyric; no singer was credited and no recording is known to survive.

Comic songs of the 1940s tended to be built on rhythm rather than melody — a bouncing dholak or tabla figure that the singer could talk across, with the tune kept deliberately simple so the words carried. Whether S. N. Tripathi followed that convention here is not documented: no transfer of the disc has surfaced, and the catalogues record only that he composed the song and I. C. Kapoor wrote it. Raag, taal, tempo and the number of voices are all unrecorded.

The comparison in the title is doing precise work. Dabe paanv — pressed feet, weight taken off the heel — is the Hindi idiom for moving without wanting to be heard, and pairing it with a cat adds the second half of the joke: not just stealth but the particular self-possessed, unhurried stealth of an animal that is certain it will not be caught. It is the vocabulary of catching someone out, and it turns the singer into a witness rather than a participant. Since no text of the lyric has been located, who is creeping and who is watching is not known.

Bachpan was made by Homi Wadia's Basant Pictures, a studio then known for Fearless Nadia stunt pictures, and it is a social family drama instead: Bhairav (Mazhar Khan), embittered and living alone on a mountainside after his son married outside their caste, is slowly softened by Madhu (Baby Madhuri), the young niece a relative sends to live with him. Madhu is twice abducted — once by the aunt, who sells her as a companion to the wealthy invalid Kamla (Baby Shakuntala), and once by Kamla's jealous governess — and the film ends with the village schoolteacher Ramesh (B. Nandrekar) and his beloved (Chandraprabha) clearing Bhairav's name at the police station. I. C. Kapoor wrote the story, the dialogue and all ten song lyrics; S. N. Tripathi composed the score.

Nothing of this song survives beyond the title in the film's song list. It was not reissued, no collector's transfer has appeared, and it is absent from every anthology of 1940s comic film songs. Its documentary value is that it confirms the shape of the score: a Basant Pictures children's drama in 1945 was still expected to carry a comic number alongside the bhajan and the patriotic song.