Main jaana rabb de kaul....-

Chandigarh, June 16 (UNI) When her husband died a few years ago, she penned down her sorrow in a sad song -- Main jaana rabb de kol. Dil mere nu chain na aave, phirdian daanwa dol (I have to go in God's company. My heart is restless and I wander around in doldrums).

Not many people knew that Surinder Kaur, the Nightingale of Punjab who ruled over lakhs of hearts across the Indian sub-continent for about six decades with her melodious voice, also wrote some lyrics herself.

She wrote some other songs too but never recorded any of them, says her daughter Dolly Guleria who also has made a mark in singing and runs a music academy in Panchkula.

A Padmashree awardee, Surinder Kaur had built a home in Zirakpur to spend the last leg of her life in Punjab after living in Delhi for several years.

Her death wish was finally fulfilled by God even as her last wish--to die in her homeland Punjab--remained unfulfilled. She has gone TO God's company but took the final take off from a foreign land.

She died in the US, perhaps taking cue from Shiv Kumar Batalvi's verses she sang--'Ohne ik udari aisi maari, ni oh mud watnin na aaya (She took one such flight that she never came back to her land again)' Batalvi's beloved had been married off to a foreign country by her father and she never returned back and he penned this sad song under the pangs of separation.

When Surinder Kaur crooned the song and made it a bit more memorable, no one knew that she too would fly to a foreign land at the fag end of her life never to come back again.

Another Batalvi song she lent her voice to was 'Ghama di raat lammi ye jan mere geet lamme ne (Is the night of sorrow long or else my songs are lengthy?).

These verses again might be hanging over her head as she lay in coma at a New Jersy hospital in her last days struggling with multiple organ failure.

Far away in the US, she might have failed to regain her consciousness in her last days but back home in Punjab, many of her memorable numbers have become a part of the collective consciousness.

She left behind numerous memorable songs like 'Lathe di chadar utte saleti rang mahiya', 'Chan vekh ke shaukan mele di', 'Mawan te dhian ral baithian ni maye', 'Bajre da sitta', 'Suhe ve cheere walia', 'Kala Doria', 'Nach lain de ni menu deyor de viah vich', 'Ik meri akh kashni,' 'Gori diyan jhanjhra', 'Chann kithan gujariyayi raat ve', 'Jooti Kasoori pairi na poori.

UNI MA VD ND1816