Handsome girl
You charge two rupees for your service
And it’s too small for all your distress
Being for sometime my mistress!
But I love those silken cheese
That charge me five rupees
Wet in oiled black curls
Handsomest dark skin girls!
Can’t get me all the white
What I get from her all night
Turn me a slave her power
Aroma of her hair’s flower!
Are you free of shame
O girl what’s your name
Else how you give freely
Yourself for a sum measly!
Someone’s wife or mother
Tell me why I bother
And not pay you in my pity
When you sell you for poverty!
Before the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny in India and especially during the 18th century, ****** relations were quite as exploitative as the East India Company’s other relations with this country. An imagined sketch of that, this write is inspired by Jeremy Paxman's "Empire: What Ruling the World Did to the British" (2011).