By the rivers of Babylon

By the rivers of Babylon is the psalmic expression that surfaces when a recording of Boney M prompts Jumpy Joshi to cry and Pamela Chamcha to recite words learned at school. The passage moves from a popular song’s imitation of sorrow to the remembered language of exile, making the expression a meeting point between recorded performance and personal memory.

The song and the tears

A tape deck supplies the scene’s first version of the psalm: the recording is identified as the one hundred and thirty-seventh psalm, also called Super flumina, and its refrain asks how the Lord’s song can be sung in a strange land. The narrator describes the disco beat as a counterfeit imitation of pain, yet it provokes real tears from Jumpy. The contrast is central to the expression’s appearance here: a commercial recording may imitate grief, but the response it releases is not counterfeit.

The passage invokes King David calling across the centuries, so the song’s present-tense performance carries an older voice with it. Its words about singing in a strange land place displacement inside the music without resolving it into a simple account of anyone’s circumstances. The recording is at once an arrangement heard in a room and a transmission of remembered language.

Pamela’s remembered recitation

Pamela says she had to learn the psalms at school. Sitting on the floor with her head against the sofa-bed and her eyes shut tight, she begins to sing along; then she stops the tape and recites from memory. The shift from playback to spoken recollection gives the expression a second form: the psalm is no longer only something supplied by the recording, but something Pamela carries and can repeat herself.

Her recitation turns toward Jerusalem, recalling the vow not to forget it and the threatened loss of hand and tongue if that memory fails. In this scene, the psalm’s language makes remembrance bodily as well as verbal: the hand’s skill and the tongue’s speech are imagined as bound to fidelity to a lost or distant place. The expression thus gathers music, schooling, memory, and exile into one brief scene, while Jumpy’s tears show that even its reproduced form can awaken an unanticipated response.