I remember vividly the first time I heard this amusing little ditty. My late grandfather was an avid storyteller, and one especially hot afternoon during my summer vacation in Kolkata, he ventured to talk to me about the Second World War. He had been only a boy in Jessore (east Bengal) when the War struck, but he had remembered his abhigyata (that is, how he had experienced the War). It was not just a memory of being afraid of air strikes, what the Japanese would do if they actually came to Bengal, the horror of the famine of 1943 and the (later) tribulation of making a cross-border journey in 1947. It was also a memory of what he called ‘the sahebs being afraid’. This statement was followed by a chuckled reciting of the ditty quoted earlier.