Ashawari Lyrics by Kalpana Nayanamadhu

The day you left me on the path, in that sky of love,
time drowned in an ocean of tears.
If only even this moonlight had seen my sorrow back then,
I would have had to live through it, remembering you now.

Ashawari, back then I even thought your very name was sweet,
Ashawari, now I can’t even bring myself to think
how cruel you were.

We met one beautiful day, one evening, in that lovely garden,
soaking in the warmth, you turned and lay at peace against me.
For all that you smiled at me,
I never once felt that though your body was close, your heart was far away.

Ashawari….

I saw you as if you were the sun and moon going down into the west,
I never even saw that a wave that comes to the shore goes back again.
Was a passing touch all I wished for,
my girl, you who slip from my hand and pass from one hand to the next.

Ashawari….

A young man is looking back on a love that has already ended, the day she walked away and left him standing alone. He calls her Ashawari, almost like her name itself, and the song moves between the sweetness of how they once were and the bitterness of how it fell apart. You can feel him still turning it over in his mind, trying to understand how something so warm could leave him this hollow.

He reaches for big images to hold his grief. The day she left, he says, time itself drowned in an ocean of tears, that is how completely the loss swallowed his sense of the ordinary. Then he says something quietly devastating: if only even the moonlight had noticed his sorrow back then, he would at least have had something, someone, to share the weight with. The moon in Sinhala song is usually the gentle witness, the soft light that watches over lovers, and here even the moon looked away. He is that alone.

The middle of the song is the memory of the good evening, the two of them in a beautiful garden, her turning to lie against him in the warmth. It sounds like the happiest moment in his life, and that is exactly why it hurts. For all her smiling, he admits he never once sensed the truth: her body was right there beside him, but her heart was already somewhere far away. He was the only one who didn’t know it was ending.

The last verse is where he finally sees clearly, too late. He worshipped her the way you watch the sun and the moon sinking into the west, looking up at something far above him, when he should have noticed the simpler, harder truth, that a wave rolling up onto the shore always rolls back out again. She was never going to stay. He asks himself whether he was wrong even to want a little closeness from her, and the closing line lands the real wound: she is the kind of woman who slips out of one man’s hand and passes straight into the next. What is left is not anger so much as the slow ache of a man who gave everything to someone who was always about to leave.