तुम नहीं आते हो तो याद से कह दो

'Tum Nahi Aate Ho To Yaad Se Kah Do' is one of Nirmala Devi's solos in Sharda (1942), a song of longing addressed to a beloved who does not come, asking that memory at least carry the message. It belongs to the film's strand of gently melancholic numbers in which Naushad let melody and a single warm voice do the work, in the chamber-scale recording manner of the early 1940s.

Naushad keeps the tempo slow and the line conversational, in the manner of a sung address. The instrumentation is minimal — harmonium and light tabla under a string thread — so that the emphasis falls on the rise and fall of Nirmala Devi's phrasing, an approach typical of the composer's earliest work.