छाया चहुँ ओर अँधेरा

One of the five Champa songs for which no singer credit has been traced. HindiGeetMala, MySwar, the Wikipedia film list and Saregama's digital reissue all carry the title; none of them names a voice, and the digital reissue's auto-generated artist field carries only a placeholder rather than a name. The singers array here is therefore left empty on purpose. The title itself is the darkest on the album — darkness fallen on all four sides — which in a 1945 'social' would normally mark the point where the story turns against its protagonist.

The commercial reissue runs three minutes thirteen seconds, which is all that is known about the recording's shape; no collector's transfer of the original disc has surfaced for comparison and no description of the arrangement exists. Unlike most of the album, this side is given to Lachhiram Tamar alone: HindiGeetMala and MySwar both name him and neither names Anupam Ghatak, and no disc transfer survives to contradict them.

'Chahun ore' is the ordinary Hindi phrase for all four directions, and the title puts darkness in all of them. Used in a film lyric it is not a description of nightfall but of a situation closing in, the moment at which a character can see no way out in any direction. That is as much as the title supports. No text of the song survives — HindiGeetMala states plainly that it has no lyrics for it — so nothing is asserted here about what the verses actually say.

Champa was made at Shorey Pictures in Lahore for the producer Roop K. Shorey and directed by Barkat Ram Mehra; it opened at the Crown cinema in Lahore in October 1945 with Manorama, Asha Posley, Hari Shivdasani, Majnu, Salma and Zahoor Shah in the cast. No plot summary of the film survives, and no print is known to circulate — the discs, issued on Columbia and now in the Saregama catalogue, are effectively the whole of what is left of it. Songs like this one are the reason the film's story cannot be reconstructed: the running order gives us a mood — a prayer, a flirtation, a folk lament, and this — but no sequence, no scene notes and no picturisation to attach them to.

The song's only presence today is as a track on a digital reissue of the Champa album, running 3:13 and played little more than a hundred times. There is no cover, no compilation appearance and no commentary on it anywhere; the catalogue entry is the whole of its afterlife.