Nadeeshani (Bawayen Bawe) Lyrics by Abewardana Balasuriya

Through birth after birth, fulfilling my every prayer,
you came, searching out the love in my heart.
Nadeeshani, Nadeeshani, Nadeeshani, Nadeeshani.

The sway of your eyes cools the fever in my heart,
that grace spreading out across the whole land.
Your smile, a flower in bloom, scattering sweet nectar,
like a tender vine you cooled me and came close.

We danced in days gone by, hidden from every eye.
Comfort me for all time, the way you do today.
In the barren plain of my life I look for a patch of shade.
Come and meet me again, from one age to the next.

A young man sings to the woman he loves, Nadeeshani, and for him this is not a love that began the day they met. He believes it has carried over from past lives. When he says you came to me through birth after birth, he is reaching into the Buddhist idea of saṃsāra, the long chain of rebirths, and saying his heart has been waiting for her across all of them. So the song opens not with a crush but with something that feels fated, a love that finally found its answer after countless lifetimes of wishing.

The middle of the song is where he tries to put that feeling into pictures. The soft movement of her eyes, he says, cools the fever in his heart, in Sinhala love poetry the heart in love is hot and restless, and a single look from the beloved is the thing that finally settles it. Her smile is a flower opening and letting go its sweet nectar, the kind of beauty that gives something away freely. And he calls her a tender creeper that came close and cooled him, the image of a vine winding gently around and offering shade, soft, clinging, alive. Each picture is about the same thing: she is the calm his restless heart has been looking for.

By the last verse the longing turns toward the future and back into that cycle of lifetimes again. He remembers them dancing together, unseen, somewhere in the past, and asks her to keep comforting him the way she does now, forever. The line that lands hardest is the one about the barren plain of his life, where he is searching for a patch of shade. Life without her is a dry, open wilderness with nowhere to rest, and she is the one cool, sheltering tree in it. So he ends with a plea that is really the whole song in one breath: find me again, in this life and the next, from one age to the next, and never let me cross the wilderness alone.