A quarter, a glass, nobody else

Drinking alone in India is a very ordinary thing that almost nobody writes music about honestly, which is odd, because the ghazal singers built an entire industry on precisely this scene. One man, one glass, a lot of time, and a poem that has been waiting three hundred years for exactly this listener. Pankaj Udhas made a career of it. So did Jagjit Singh, from a slightly more respectable chair.

The film catalogue is better at it than you would expect too. Thodi Si Jo Pee Li Hai is nominally comic and is not, once you notice the man is explaining himself to a room that has not asked. Din Dhal Jaye, from Guide in 1965, is S. D. Burman's tune and Mohammed Rafi's voice, and it is a song about the evening being worse than the day. Koi Humdum Na Raha is Kishore Kumar with nobody left to sing to.

What makes a song right for this specifically, rather than just sad, is that it has to survive repetition. On your own, a song gets played four times, not once. Anything with a big dramatic peak wears out by the second listen; the ghazals do not, because they were built as long forms for exactly this kind of attention. So the shuffle here weights slow and unornamented over loud and cathartic, and the room stays at its dimmest setting the whole time.

Two neighbouring rooms, in case this is not the one. If you want to be actively upset rather than quietly occupied, rone wale gane is built to get it out of you. If somebody specific is the reason, breakup songs is the page. And if you would rather not be alone with it at all - fair enough, that is what yaari is for, even at a distance.