परदेसी ढोला आज मिलेंगे

A reunion duet sung by Zohrabai Ambalewali and Shyam Kumar — the only song in Chhamia whose full singer credit both hindigeetmala and the BollySwar compendium record identically. The title is in the folk register of the north-western plains: dhola is the Punjabi and Rajasthani word for the beloved, and pardesi is the man who has gone away to work, the standing figure of separation in that region's song tradition.

The recording is not in circulation, so the arrangement cannot be described. What the credit itself tells us is the shape: a two-voice number with a male and a female part, which in the 1945 idiom almost always meant alternating verses over a common refrain. Zohrabai Ambalewali was at the height of her career in this period, and pairing her with Shyam Kumar rather than with one of the era's star male voices suggests a character duet rather than a romantic set-piece — though the picturisation is not documented.

Almost every pardesi song in the north Indian tradition is a song of waiting; this one, by its title, is the rarer thing — the song of the wait ending. Aaj milenge, today we will meet, puts the whole weight on that one adverb, and the convention it draws on is the ritual of preparation: the day the traveller returns is the day of adornment, of the house being readied, of the anticipation being described rather than the meeting itself. Setting it as a duet is a deliberate choice, because it means the audience does not have to wait for the reunion the way the character has — both voices are already present in the song. The lyric text has not survived transcription and this reading rests on the title and the documented duet credit alone.

Chhamia (1945) was produced and directed by Protima Dasgupta for her own company, P.D.G. Pictures, from an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, with Begum Para in the lead and a supporting company that included the comedian David, the dancer Azurie and Dixit. Gyan Dutt supplied eleven songs to lyrics by Pandit Indra and Kabil Amritsari. The picture was a commercial success and remained the high point of Dasgupta's short career behind the camera; it is not in circulation today, so its songs are known chiefly through catalogue listings and surviving 78-rpm discs. Zohrabai Ambalewali and Shyam Kumar are credited together on this title by both catalogues consulted, making it the score's firmest attribution.

The song has not been reissued and does not appear in the standard compilations of Zohrabai Ambalewali's work, which draw almost entirely on Rattan (1944), Anmol Ghadi (1946) and the better-distributed studio productions. Chhamia, made independently and outside the studio system, fell out of the reissue pipeline entirely — which is how a song by the leading female voice of the mid-1940s ends up surviving only as a catalogue line.