Jhoota Kunda Ballads: The Ghosts of Cranford Park!

…well our dope-heads with gora love-styles  

put Rubs in a huff 

like this Dope with his insides too coconut  

to know that the stuff  

that divided the castes in the bends  

was as tight over here,  

well he should’ve sussed, most said,  

that he mucked with fire  

when his sweeper’s paws he amoured  

on a shoemaker’s daughter! Some said that’s why Rubs heirarch’d  

certain castes that bit lower  

because of their gunda behaviours!  

So that waif on the next flight  

to Punjab got spared from this love  

 

at a selfish first sight!  

At a temple then matched with a bendu 

alky (who necked 

all the dowry dosh in a dash!),  

her psyche hell-bent  

that she tossed up a rope round a beam,  

in a shed some ‘tashed men  

got to watch how possessed she’d become  

for the crack of her neck!  

The elders, I’ve heard, had her coated  

in concrete – her statue  

was erected to caution those rundies  

who’d threaten to abuse  

the laws that were cast for their benefit!  

 

Her old man went doolally,  

some said, and he blamed it on Dope  

(Capri’d with some weed  

and a pic of that chick in his palm)  

at Cranford Park car park,  

her old man with his goondas whose tinder  

for fire was our star 

Reproduced by kind permissin of the BBC, read by the author for Made in England, 9th October, 2008. Recording and text used by kind permission of Daljit Nagra.

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