सपनों के पाखी

Sapno Ke Pakhi (सपनों के पाखी, 'Birds of Dreams') is one of four original songs composed for Gulmohar (2023), Rahul V. Chittella's directorial debut about the Batra family's final days in their ancestral Delhi bungalow before it is sold and demolished. Sung by veteran playback and Sufi vocalist Kavita Seth, with lyrics by Shellee and music by the Los Angeles-based composer duo Siddhartha Khosla (known internationally for the score of This Is Us) and Alan Demoss, the track was released on 25 February 2023 by Zee Music Company as part of the Gulmohar (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) album, ahead of the film's 3 March 2023 premiere on Disney+ Hotstar. In the film, the song underscores a quiet, emotionally loaded moment: Arun (Manoj Bajpayee) leaving his mother Kusum's (Sharmila Tagore) house after learning he was adopted, its lullaby-like tenderness working against the scene's undertow of estrangement. Set against a soundtrack built to feel handmade and intimate rather than chart-oriented, Sapno Ke Pakhi is emblematic of Gulmohar's low-key, festival-circuit musical identity — the film itself premiered at the Indian Film Festival of Melbourne and went on to receive a National Film Award (Special Jury Award – Feature Film) in 2024.

Siddhartha Khosla and Alan Demoss build Sapno Ke Pakhi around a spare, largely acoustic arrangement — the kind of restrained, folk-tinged instrumentation that lets Kavita Seth's voice, textured by decades of Sufi and ghazal singing, carry the emotional weight. Seth sings the song less as a performance than as a hushed private address, in keeping with a soundtrack that, across all four Gulmohar tracks, favours intimacy and understatement over the grander orchestration typical of mainstream Hindi film music. The composers, best known internationally for their television scoring work, bring a similarly cinematic, mood-first sensibility to this song rather than a hit-single structure.

Shellee's lyric leans on classic lullaby imagery — birds descending through the gateway of closed eyelids, a chariot of moon and stars carrying fairies — language drawn from the register of a bedtime story rather than adult romance, which is precisely what gives the song its ache when set against the film's actual context. The 'paakhi' of the title, a softer, more poetic word for bird than the everyday 'chidiya,' signals from its very first line that this is a song about childhood memory and gentle departure rather than any conventional Bollywood theme.

Gulmohar follows the Batra family — matriarch Kusum (Sharmila Tagore), her son Arun (Manoj Bajpayee), daughter-in-law Indu (Simran), grandson Adi (Suraj Sharma), and Kusum's live-in companion Sudhakar (Amol Palekar) — as they gather for one last celebration at their Delhi bungalow, 'Gulmohar,' before Kusum sells it and moves to Pune. Over the course of the film, long-buried tensions surface, including the revelation that Arun was adopted, a fact that reshapes his relationship with the house he is leaving. Sapno Ke Pakhi plays under this exact beat — Arun's quiet exit from his mother's home — lending the family drama's emotional climax a lullaby's softness rather than a confrontation's sharpness. The film, written by Arpita Mukherjee and Rahul V. Chittella and produced by Star Studios, Chalkboard Entertainment and Autonomous Works, premiered on Disney+ Hotstar on 3 March 2023.

Sapno Ke Pakhi never aimed for chart dominance — its YouTube upload sits in the tens of thousands of views, modest even by festival-film standards — but it is part of a soundtrack that outlived its box-office-adjacent release cycle: Gulmohar went on to win the National Film Award (Special Jury Award – Feature Film) in 2024, and its songs, including this one, remain part of the film's critical afterlife as an example of restrained, character-driven Hindi film scoring rather than mass-market playback music.