ये चाँद हमें हँस कर कुछ याद दिलाता है

S. N. Tripathi's ghazal-inflected solo for Adhar (1945) is sung on record by the film's leading man, Umakant Desai, rather than by a professional playback voice — an arrangement still common in mid-1940s Bombay. M. A. Razi's verse addresses the moon, whose smiling face stirs memory and wakes desires that had been lying asleep in the breast, and then turns forward: towards an embrace, towards days that will pass in the talk of love, towards a fortune that has finally stirred. Of the film's six documented songs this is the only one known to be accessible today.

The song sits in the film-ghazal idiom that S. N. Tripathi handled comfortably: an unhurried melodic line, phrases that settle on held notes, and an opening couplet that returns as a refrain after each verse rather than being developed. What is unusual is the voice. Umakant Desai was an actor, not a trained playback singer, and the recording carries the plain, close-to-speech tone of a screen performer singing his own number — a practice that was standard through the 1930s, still workable in 1945, and effectively finished by the end of the decade as dedicated playback voices took over.

M. A. Razi builds the lyric on one of the oldest devices in Urdu-Hindi poetry — the moon as the witness who will not let the heart forget. But he inverts the usual melancholy of the chaand-and-memory pairing. Here the moon's smile does not reopen a wound; it wakes desires that had gone to sleep in the breast, and the poem then moves outward from remembrance into anticipation: of meeting, of days spent in the talk of love, of a fate that has at last woken. The diction is plain Hindustani rather than heavily Persianate Urdu, pitched for the general audience of a modestly budgeted social rather than for a connoisseur of the ghazal.

Adhar (1945), also catalogued as Aadhaar, was a 'social' produced by Geeta Pictures, Bombay, and directed by Ramanlal Lalbhai Desai, with S. N. Tripathi composing to lyrics by M. A. Razi. Umakant Desai played the hero opposite an actress billed only as Kokila, with Yakub, Shahzadi, Firoza, Usha and others in support. No print circulates and no plot summary survives, so the placement of any individual song within the narrative is unrecoverable; the Hindi Film Geet Kosh listing and the Columbia record labels are effectively the whole surviving record of the film. This is one of two solos credited to the film's hero, and the recording that keeps Adhar in the record at all.

This is the song by which Adhar is remembered at all. In March 2026 the film historian Arunkumar Deshmukh posted it as a guest article on the archival blog Atul's Song A Day, filing it under 'rare song' and using the film as an illustration of why the Hindi Film Geet Kosh matters — without it, he argued, films of this kind would have vanished without historians even registering that they had existed. The recording is also a small surviving trace of Umakant Desai the singer: more than a decade after he sang two duets with Rajkumari in the Gujarati hit Sansar Leela (1934), he was still putting his own voice on his own songs.