Udawadiya Male Lyrics by Various

They say the sun bursts open
in the season when stars come into bloom.
They say the moon dies away,
giving its light to the stars that shine in the sky.
All across the earth it bloomed,
and a fragrance of flowers came drifting.
On the mountaintop it grew,
just like us.

Orchid flower,
we grew up entwined.
Bound together since the mother’s womb,
of one nest.

By the mirage, beside a dream,
let us stop and laugh together.
Smoothing each other’s feathers, in a single dream,
let us become one flock and take flight.
The love that filled my chest as I held you close
is like my very life.

Orchid flower,
we grew up entwined.
Bound together since the mother’s womb,
of one nest.

They say the sun bursts open
in the season when stars come into bloom.
They say the moon dies away,
giving its light to the stars that shine in the sky.
All across the earth it bloomed,
and a fragrance of flowers came drifting.
On the mountaintop it grew,
just like us.

Orchid flower,
we grew up entwined.
Bound together since the mother’s womb,
of one nest.

Head resting on one shoulder,
let me kiss the young woman’s brow.
In one mother’s womb to be born tomorrow,
let us speak the name of love.
The love that filled my chest as I held you close
is like my very life.

Orchid flower,
we grew up entwined.
Bound together since the mother’s womb,
of one nest.

They say the sun bursts open
in the season when stars come into bloom.
They say the moon dies away,
giving its light to the stars that shine in the sky.
All across the earth it bloomed,
and a fragrance of flowers came drifting.
On the mountaintop it grew,
just like us.

Orchid flower,
we grew up entwined.
Bound together since the mother’s womb,
of one nest.

This is a love song about two people who feel they were never really separate, a man singing to the woman he loves as though the two of them were one plant grown from a single root. The whole song turns on one image, the udawadiya, the wild orchid that climbs and winds around its host until you cannot tell where one stem ends and the other begins. When he calls her “orchid flower” and says “we grew up entwined,” he is saying their lives are tangled together that closely, not two people who met and chose each other but two halves that grew up wrapped around one another.

He pushes that closeness as far as it will go. “Bound together since the mother’s womb, of one nest” is not a literal claim of being siblings, it is the deepest way Sinhala has of saying two souls belong to the same source, as if they came from one womb and one bird’s nest. The line repeats like a vow, and each time it lands it tells you this love feels older than the two of them. The opening verse stretches the same feeling across the whole sky and earth. The sun bursting open while the stars bloom, the moon dying so its light can pass to the stars, a flower opening all over the world and sending up its scent, an orchid growing high on a mountaintop, all of it is “just like us.” He is saying their bond is part of the order of things, written into the way the heavens and the earth already move.

The middle verses are tender and almost weightless. By a shimmering mirage, beside a dream, he wants them to stop and laugh, and then, like a pair of birds smoothing each other’s feathers, to gather as one flock and fly off inside a single dream. Birds preening each other and flying together is a quiet picture of the small daily care of love and of two lives moving as one. He kisses her forehead with her head on his shoulder, and then makes the boldest wish of all, that even if they are born again tomorrow, they will be born into the same womb and once more speak the name of love. That is the song’s heart, a love that wants to outlast this one life and carry over into the next.

What the listener is left holding is the warmth of the line he keeps returning to, that the love filling his chest as he holds her close is “like my very life.” Nothing about this song is restless or aching. It is calm and sure, the voice of someone who has found the person he is bound to and only wants to stay wound around her, in this life and any that follow.