चला जा रहा हूँ

Both hindigeetmala and myswar credit this song to Sunder, and hindigeetmala's separate singer index for Sunder lists it among his ten catalogued recordings — the same index that runs on through Chandni Chowk, Jhamela and Pilpili Saheb, the comedies of his later career. The double listing is the strongest confirmation available that the Zid credit is real and not a stray database entry. The lyric itself is lost; only the opening words survive as a title.

Nothing about the arrangement is documented. What can be said is the frame: a G. A. Chishti composition of 1945, sung not by a trained playback voice but by an actor recording his own number, which in practice meant a melody kept within a comfortable middle range and an accompaniment — harmonium, dholak, a few strings — light enough not to expose the singer. That is the working method of the period, not a description of this particular record.

'Chala jaa raha hoon' is a leaving stated as it happens — not 'I left' and not 'I will go', but the continuous present, the departure narrated by the person walking out of it. Hindi film lyric uses this tense to keep the door open: a man saying he is going is also, by saying it aloud, giving the listener the length of a song in which to stop him. Whether Zid's plot took that offer is not recorded anywhere.

The song belongs to a film that failed: Wikipedia lists Zid between Shukriya (1944) and Jhoothi Kasmein (1948) as the middle of three consecutive commercial disappointments for H. S. Rawail, who directed and also photographed it. Its songs went out on 78-rpm discs from a Calcutta production house, Shree Bharatlaxmi Pictures, and were not reissued.

No recording of this title has surfaced in the collector uploads that preserved two other Zid songs, and no reissue is documented. Its value now is as evidence: one of six entries proving that a cast actor, not a playback singer, carried most of a 1945 film's score.