छाई घटा घनघोर गगन में

A three-minute-thirty-nine-second solo for Renuka Devi, written by Bharat Vyas and composed by S. K. Pal — the second-longest track on the album and its clearest piece of seasonal writing. The title announces a dense, dark cloud-cover spread across the sky, which in the Hindi film songbook is never only weather: the barsaat song is the standard vehicle for longing, and by 1945 it was already a fixed convention that a heroine left alone sings to the gathering monsoon.

Pal keeps this one in the middle tempo band and gives Renuka Devi the whole length of it — no chorus, no second voice, no instrumental interlude long enough to take the song away from her. The barsaat setting in 1940s Hindi film music runs on a small vocabulary of devices: a rolling percussive figure for the approaching cloud, a sustained melodic line for the wait, and a melody that stays close to folk contours so the audience can carry it out of the theatre. This is the album's most conventional composition and probably its most immediately singable.

Bharat Vyas wrote in Hindi rather than Urdu, and on this soundtrack that distinction is audible: against Majaz's and Josh's Urdu lines his register is Braj-inflected, seasonal, drawn from bhakti and folk idiom rather than the ghazal. 'Ghanghor' — dense, thunderous — is a word of that lineage, and a sky described that way in Hindi verse always carries the beloved's absence with it. Vyas would spend the next three decades refining exactly this vocabulary, through Do Aankhen Barah Haath and Navrang; here, early in his career, the manner is already fully formed.

Bharat Vyas is the most present person on Ghulami's credits: he wrote five of its nine songs, sang on two, and appears in the cast as an actor. That triple role was not unusual for a working writer at a mid-sized 1945 studio, but it is unusual to find it documented so plainly. This monsoon solo is one of the five he wrote and one of the four he did not sing, leaving it entirely to Renuka Devi. The film itself, directed by Mohan Wadhwani for Shalimar Pictures, has no surviving plot record, so where this song sat in the narrative is unknown.

Of Ghulami's nine tracks this is the one that has had the most independent circulation, appearing on lyric sites and in old-film-song listings under its own name rather than only as part of the album. That is a modest afterlife, but for a 1945 film with no surviving print it counts. Its main documentary value is as an early sample of Bharat Vyas at work in the seasonal-Hindi mode that would later carry his best-known songs, and as one of the fuller surviving recordings of Renuka Devi singing unaccompanied by another voice.