Ra Pal Rakina Lyrics by Abewardana Balasuriya

In the chena where I watch through the night, the finger millet ripening,
even you aren’t here to keep me company in my loneliness.
Tomorrow, once you’ve gone off in marriage, my dear,
the village will feel as empty as a poya day.

For all that I saw you up on the high ground across the way,
for all that you sat on the channel bank and waved your hand,
for all that I spoke up and told you what was in my heart,
it wasn’t to be, cousin, for want of merit earned before.

Did I build this hut just to sit in it alone?
Was the love we tied since childhood meant to break?
Through the three watches of the night, am I to pay out this much sorrow?
Are we never to be together for real, only in dreams?

A day must pass without my cousin now.
A rich man’s princess will be handed to me in marriage.
May Pattini and the guardian gods of the village protect us.
On the day I cut the millet, she comes to my mind.

A young man sits up through the night in a watch-hut out in the chena, the hillside plot where his family grows kurahan, the finger millet. He is meant to be guarding the ripening crop from wild animals, but his mind is on a girl, and the song is really the long, lonely ache of those night hours. She is about to be married off to someone else, and there is nothing he can do about it.

The opening sets the whole mood. Out here the only company on these long nights was the thought of her, and now even that is being taken away. He says that once she goes off in marriage, the village will feel “as empty as a poya day.” On poya, the full-moon Buddhist holy day, the village goes quiet and still, no work in the fields, everyone subdued. That is the emptiness he is bracing for, a whole village gone hushed and hollow because one person has left it.

Then he goes back over the little courtship that happened across the fields. He saw her on the high ground on the far side, she sat on the bund of the irrigation channel and waved to him, he worked up the nerve to tell her how he felt. In a farming village that channel-bank flirting, calling and waving across the water, was how young people met. He keeps repeating “for all that,” piling up each sweet moment, only to end each time on the same wall: “naadan massinae, pera pin naethuwaata,” it came to nothing for want of merit earned in a past life. That phrase carries the Buddhist idea that what you get in this life is shaped by the good you stored up before, so when he says they lacked that merit, he means they were never fated to have each other, and there is a quiet, helpless acceptance in it. He calls her massinae, cousin, the word a man uses for the cross-cousin he is traditionally free to marry, which is exactly why losing her stings so much. She was the one who should have been his.

The third verse is all bare hurt. Did he put up this hut only to sit in it alone? Was a love tied since childhood meant to snap? Must he bleed out this grief through every watch of the night, and are they never to meet for real, only in dreams? In the last verse he stops fighting it. A day has to pass without her now, and the village is already telling him a “rich man’s princess” will be found for him to marry, a polite way of saying he will be married off to someone of better standing, as if that fixes anything. He hands the whole thing to the gods, praying to Pattini and the village guardian deities to watch over them. And the song closes on the one truth he cannot shake: on the day he goes out to cut the millet, the day this whole season of waiting ends, it is her face that comes to him. The crop he guarded all night was never really the point. She was.