मोटर गाड़ी चलाने वाले ओ बालमा

The liveliest-sounding title on the album, and one of two Nirmala Devi–Khan Mastana duets in it. The line yokes two vocabularies that did not belong together: 'balma', the Braj-Awadhi word for a husband or lover that comes out of village song, and 'motor gaadi', a machine that in 1945 India still signified money, the city and a certain kind of modern swagger. Hindi cinema of the 1940s and 1950s built a small durable genre out of that collision — the driver song, the transport song — and this is an early specimen of it.

No recording is in circulation, so nothing can be claimed about how this particular number was set. What is documented is Gobind Ram's manner in these years: light melodic writing with a ghazal and thumri inflection rather than a distinctly Punjabi folk one, a small orchestra built around harmonium, sarangi and tabla, and tunes pitched to sit comfortably in the middle of a classically trained voice instead of stretching it. Songs of this type in the period conventionally ran on a bright kaharwa with the rhythm section doing the work of the engine, and left room for the two singers to interrupt each other; whether that describes this record cannot be established without hearing it.

The address is the point. She does not call him by name or by relation but by what he is driving — 'you who drive the motor car' — which is how a flirtation works when the thing being admired is a possession as much as a person. In the folk originals this slot is filled by a bullock cart or a boat; substituting the motor car updates the joke without changing its shape, and keeps the rustic 'balma' in place so that the modern object sits inside an old form. That mismatch is the wit of the line, and it is also a small piece of social history: the automobile arriving in the village song. Pandit Indra is credited with the lyric; none of it is quoted here.

Chalis Karod — 'Forty Crores', the number that stood through the 1940s for the population of undivided India — was directed by Nanabhai Bhatt for Chandra Art Productions of Bombay, a year before Bhatt set up his own Deepak Pictures. Gobind Ram composed, Pandit Indra and I. C. Kapoor were credited with the songs, and the cast paired Nirmala Devi with her husband Arun Kumar Ahuja alongside Yakub, Agha and Gope. No plot summary of the film survives in any source consulted for this entry, so the nine song titles are effectively all that remains of what the picture was about. The song is one of the reasons this entry reads Chalis Karod as a contemporary social picture rather than a mythological or costume subject: a motor-car flirtation number does not belong in either of those genres.

Nothing of the recording survives in circulation, and the song is not remembered. The type is: from the tonga and driver songs of the 1940s through to Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi (1958) and beyond, the Hindi film song kept returning to the vehicle as a place where flirtation could happen in public. 'Motor Gadi Chalane Wale O Baalma' is one of the early, undocumented entries in that line. Nothing of the recording is in general circulation today: there is no known commercial reissue and no print of the film in public availability. Its survival is documentary — a line in the Hindi Geet Mala catalogue and the Cinemaazi credit sheet — which is the ordinary fate of most of the roughly two hundred Hindi films released each year in the mid-1940s.