Somiyata Waren Putha Lyrics by Nihal Nelson

Come on over to the toddy, son, the door isn’t bolted
Listen to some real talk in brother Gune’s room
Sit yourself down off to the side, my friend
There’s Muscat, treacle and boondi sweets here in my room
This is brother Gune’s room, where we knock back a drink
This is brother Gune’s room, where we knock back a drink

Loading up the green stuff, then the brown weed too
Sniffing and shooting up, hunting around here and there for a buzz
Living it up, getting high, getting wasted
They go off cut down, after tasting kingly comforts right here
Putting up signboards, hanging cameras and curtains
Super-men strutting around showing off, working in the elephant’s clan
Heavy loads tip over onto a foreign leg
Two thousand, three thousand, tossed away
This is brother Gune’s room, where we knock back a drink
This is brother Gune’s room, where we knock back a drink

Out of a Tinkiri tin can, or else from a tonic bottle
If the paste keeps coming out, the work goes on, hand and foot
If you mock and spit on this trade, your oil will run out, by Veedagama
No stones, no sand, no thorns, no lies, my work is by the pound
Whatever the cross, however the cross, I’ve no room left beside me
Every single person’s whole story is right there in my file
For sorrow or for comfort, I enter them in, my book holds no lies
Blades cannot cut through
the goodness in a person’s heart

This is one of Nihal Nelson’s famous comic satires, and the voice doing the talking is a grave-digger, a coffin man who calls himself brother Gune. He swings open the door of his back room, where the door is never bolted, and waves a younger friend inside for a drink. There’s local toddy, there’s arrack (“Muscat”), there’s treacle and boondi sweets laid out, and over those glasses he starts to gossip about the world. That cosy, slightly tipsy invitation is the whole frame of the song. We are sitting in the room where the dead are handled, listening to the man who handles them tell us the truth about the living.

What he gossips about is the rot he sees in society, and the slang is thick and street-smart. He runs through the drug crowd first, “pachcha” (the green, ganja), “kochchi” (a slang for weed), the sniffing and the shooting up, people chasing a high and living like kings until they are “cut down” and end up exactly where he is, at the grave. Then he turns on the powerful and the fraudulent. The “super-men” hanging up signboards and cameras and curtains, strutting about and “working in the elephant’s clan” (a jab at the political party whose symbol was the elephant), are the big shots putting on a grand show. He watches the foreign loans and the bribes, the “heavy loads” tipping over, two thousand, three thousand thrown around and wasted. The joke underneath it all is that none of these mighty, corrupt people escape him. Whatever face they wore, they come to brother Gune’s room in the end.

The third verse is the grave-digger’s own boast, and it is where the satire bites hardest. Whether the embalming fluid comes “out of a Tinkiri tin or a tonic bottle,” as long as the paste keeps flowing his work goes on. He warns, half-joking, that anyone who mocks his trade will find their own oil running out, swearing it “by Veedagama” (a place name used like an oath). His work is honest, he says, “by the pound,” no stones or sand or thorns or lies padding it out, a dig at all the cheats who short-change people in life. Crosses of every size are lined up with no space left between them, because the dead keep coming. And then the line that gives the whole comedy its sting: every person’s entire story, “watha gotha,” the whole twisted tale, sits in his file. Rich or poor, crooked or clean, he enters them all into his book, and his book tells no lies.

He closes on the one truth a man who buries everybody is entitled to deliver. A blade can cut through flesh, through wood, through almost anything, but it “cannot cut through the goodness in a person’s heart.” After three verses of mocking the greedy and the fake, the grave-digger lands on the only thing he has found worth keeping. Everything else, the money, the show, the foreign loans, the highs, all of it ends up on his table. What outlasts the blade and the grave is a good heart. That is the song’s real punchline, and it is why this drinking-room joke of a song has stayed loved for so long.