इंतज़ार था

Intezaar Tha (इंतज़ार था) is a romantic duet from Tiku Weds Sheru (2023), the Amazon Prime Video original produced by Kangana Ranaut's Manikarnika Films and written and directed by Sai Kabir, who also composed and wrote lyrics for the film's music alongside Gaurav Chatterji. Released across separate male (sung by Gaurav Chatterji), female (sung by Monali Thakur) and reprise (Sai Kabir and Gaurav Chatterji) versions as part of the film's seven-track soundtrack, the song accompanies the unlikely love story of Sheru (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), an ageing junior artist in the Mumbai film industry, and Tiku (Avneet Kaur), a small-town girl who marries him hoping the union will be her ticket to a Bollywood career. The film premiered on Prime Video on 23 June 2023 to mixed-to-negative reviews, with the leads' performances singled out for praise even as critics panned the writing.

Sai Kabir and Gaurav Chatterji, both credited as composers on Tiku Weds Sheru, built Intezaar Tha as an intimate, slow-tempo ballad meant to be flexible enough to carry three distinct emotional registers — a male solo, a female solo, and a shorter reprise duet. Monali Thakur's rendition of the female version leans into a restrained, breathy delivery typical of her ballad work, while Gaurav Chatterji's male version and the Sai Kabir-Chatterji reprise keep the melody consistent across versions, letting the arrangement's sparse instrumentation put the vocal performances at the centre.

Sai Kabir's lyric centres the title phrase 'intezaar tha' (there was a wait) as its emotional anchor, using the Urdu-inflected vocabulary of longing common to Hindi film balladry to frame the space between two people not yet together — a theme that echoes the film's own central irony, in which Tiku's and Sheru's marriage of convenience gradually waits its way into something resembling real affection.

Tiku Weds Sheru follows Tasleem 'Tiku' Khan (Avneet Kaur), who marries Shiraz 'Sheru' Khan Afghani (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), a long-struggling junior artist, believing the marriage will be her escape route into Mumbai's film industry and a shot at stardom — only for both to find something more genuine than either expected as their lives intertwine. Directed by Sai Kabir under Kangana Ranaut's Manikarnika Films banner and released on Amazon Prime Video on 23 June 2023, the film received a mixed critical reception, with reviewers praising Kaur's and Siddiqui's performances while criticising the screenplay; Intezaar Tha's male, female and reprise versions are woven through the film to underscore the couple's evolving, initially transactional relationship.

Intezaar Tha did not chart or generate major standalone virality, functioning instead as a supporting emotional thread within the Tiku Weds Sheru soundtrack; its multiple versions (male, female, reprise) reflect a soundtrack approach common to Hindi film scoring, where a single melody is reused across a film to track a relationship's emotional arc rather than to produce one definitive chart single. The song's modest YouTube view counts place it well below the film's more widely circulated track, Tum Se Milke, though it remains part of the small discography connecting composer-actor Sai Kabir's writing-directing-composing hyphenate work on the film.