The poet Gopaldas Neeraj passed away this week. He was the last of a cohort working in the 1960s — SD Burman, Shankar-Jaikishen and Dev Anand among them — that created some of our most abiding Hindi film songs. But they especially gave us our more abiding love songs, still sung when a little bit of rum has gone down at parties and addas.

Neeraj was noted for bringing a fresh, crystalline Hindi into film songs, which had relied on a repertoire of Urdu romantic phraseology. His lyrics created delicate, internal rhythms, tripping inside sentences, words playing peekaboo with words, as if finding counterparts in each other. Take for instance lines from two of his most famous songs: "rangeela re, yun ranga hai, tere rang mein, mera rang/rasiya re, na bujhe hai, koi jal se, yeh jalan" and, "kitna madir, kitna madhur, tera mera pyaar". They are like a fever-dream of language — where a word is used as verb and noun and adjective — rang, ranga and rangeela — or words are by a syllable — jal/jalan, madhur/madir — (honeyed, intoxicating), their meanings and sounds just touching each other before sliding past. It is a romance with words as much as romance in words.