Lakdi Ki Kathiलकड़ी की काठी

This is one of the most cherished children’s songs in India, and though it comes from a film, it feels as old and as natural as a playground rhyme. Its subject is the simplest of toys: a hobby-horse, a wooden horse mounted on a stick. Give its tail a playful tap, and away it goes — dauda, dauda, dauda — galloping and galloping, tail in the air, carrying its small rider off into pure imagination. There is no plot; the joy is entirely in the bounce of the words and the thunder of the make-believe gallop.

The song was written for the 1983 Hindi film Masoom by Gulzar — one of India’s most revered poets and lyricists — with a tune by the composer R. D. Burman, and sung in the film by Vanita Mishra, Gauri Bapat and Gurpreet Kaur. The verse printed here is only its opening; the full song sends the horse on to the town square, where a barber gives it a shave, and to the vegetable market, where it catches cold on the ice, with a clip-clopping chag-bag chag-bag between the verses. Decades on, Indian children still gallop around to it, and the wooden horse on its little stick never tires.