Rathu Ratakaju Lyrics by Lahiru Perera

Red cashews and white cashews, cooked up together
A dress stitched from two kinds of red printed cloth
Samare aiya’s sarong got a stain on it
And there’s not enough water to wash it out, poor thing
The battery has died in little teacher’s torch
The potato lorry and the onion lorry crashed into each other
From the banana grove you can hear baila being belted out
And they go rising up like crocodile buns

Popped grain falls from the rampe plant, coconuts grow on the breadfruit tree
Dompe is just too far, the cost runs into crores
Like the good milk toffee they brought from a breadfruit-tree market
I put together a song like that and tried it out
I put together a song like this and tried it out

They’re singing baila to the great Queen of England
They’re saying let’s beat the dolak drum for Prince William
They take ripe jak fruit and go give it to Beckham
In the middle of a London street they’re frying kokis
They take a guppy fish and go and sew a saree
They rent out the White House and set up a roadside stall
To work at the saree stall they bring Madhuri over
And they tell Shah Rukh to come and sweep up

They wave the flag saying “Chakde, Lanka”
They bring Chuck Norris over and have him flick them on the head
They bring over the umpires who catch chuckers
To check whether the bend was inside the eye
I’m going all alone to see the edge of the world

This is a comic nonsense song, the kind of playful baila that Sri Lankans sing for pure fun. There is no love story here and no hidden ache. The whole point is the joy of stringing together impossible, silly pictures and laughing at how absurd they are. The singer even tells you what he is doing partway through: he says he just sat down and put a song together to see how it would turn out, “I put together a song like this and tried it out.”

The humour works by smashing two worlds into each other. On one side you have everyday village Sri Lanka: red and white cashews, a sarong with a stain, a torch with a dead battery, lorries of potatoes and onions, banana groves, breadfruit and jak, kokis (the crisp fried New Year snack), milk toffee from a roadside market. On the other side he drags in the grandest names he can think of, the Queen of England, Prince William, David Beckham, the White House, the Bollywood stars Madhuri Dixit and Shah Rukh Khan, Chuck Norris. The fun is in the collision. He pictures villagers singing baila to the Queen, beating a dolak drum for the prince, frying kokis in the middle of a London street, renting out the White House just to run a little roadside stall, and getting Shah Rukh Khan to come and sweep the floor. Putting global royalty and movie idols to work at a Sri Lankan village stall is the joke, and it lands because it is so cheeky.

A few lines lean on impossible images on purpose, that is the flavour of this style. Popped grain falling from the rampe (pandan) plant and coconuts growing on a breadfruit tree are things that simply cannot happen, so they signal “this is all in fun.” “Crocodile buns” (kimbula banis, a long ridged sweet bun shaped a bit like a crocodile) rising up out of nowhere is the same kind of gag. The cricket verse plays on local sporting memory: “Chakde” is borrowed from the Hindi cheer “Chak De” (go for it), the chant becomes “Chakde, Lanka,” and then he jokes about chuckers (bowlers with a suspect, bent-arm action), bringing in umpires and even Chuck Norris to check whether the bend was real, “inside the eye.”

By the end he shrugs off all sense entirely and says he is going off alone to see the very edge of the world (lokaanthe), the far end of the earth. It is the perfect closing line for a song that never meant to make sense in the first place. The reward here is not deep feeling but the grin it leaves you with, the cleverness of the wordplay and the warmth of village humour poking gentle fun at the whole wide world.