दिल याद में किसी की

'Dil Yaad Mein Kisi Ki' is one of six numbers in Begum (1945) sung by Naseem Banu herself. Naseem was among the last generation of Hindi screen leads who were expected to sing their own songs, and Begum — produced under Taj Mahal Pictures, the banner she ran with her husband Mian Ehsan-ul-Haq — gave her a score built almost entirely around her voice. Music by Hari Prasanna Das, words by Gopal Singh Nepali.

The recording is not in circulation and its arrangement cannot be described from listening. What can be said is what the casting implies: Naseem Banu was not a trained professional playback singer but an actress from a household of singers — her mother Chamiyan Bai was a celebrated singer and tawaif of Old Delhi — and a composer writing for her would have kept the melodic line within a comfortable, speech-adjacent range rather than pitching it for a classically drilled voice. That constraint shaped a great deal of pre-playback film music.

The title places the heart inside someone else's memory rather than the other way round — the heart lives in the remembering, and the absent person is what it is made of. This inversion is standard equipment in the Urdu-Hindi lyric of separation, where the beloved's absence is not an interruption of life but its content. Gopal Singh Nepali writes it in unforced Hindi rather than the high Urdu register, which is the mark of his verse across this score.

Begum paired Naseem Banu with Ashok Kumar — then the biggest star in Indian cinema after Kismet (1943) — a year after the two had appeared together in Filmistan's Chal Chal Re Naujawan (1944), which was also written by Saadat Hasan Manto. Sushil Majumdar directed; the supporting cast recorded by hindigeetmala is Sharda, Puri, Vikram Kapoor and V. H. Desai. No plot summary of the film survives in the accessible archives.

Along with the Rafi duet, this is the joint highest-rated Begum song on hindigeetmala — both carry 4.5 from four listener votes, where most of the rest of the score has one or two — a modest afterlife, but more than the other songs have. Naseem Banu went on acting until Nausherwan-E-Adil (1957) and is remembered today chiefly for Pukar (1939) and Sheesh Mahal (1950), and as the mother of Saira Banu; her singing, confined to the pre-playback years, is credited on around twenty titles in the song databases, six of them from Begum.