Hawasaka Ma Lyrics by Abhisheka WimalaweeraLahiru Perera

One evening I saw you and lost my way
the day I stood alone in a waterless desert
a single star pointed out the right road
it told me the path that comes through the desert.. one evening I…

The cherry blossoms bloomed and dressed the way like a veil
they decked out the road you came along
without a heart that pierces and ruins,
that love I gave you became everything

One evening I saw you and lost my way….

Weeping at the sun that won’t go down to the west,
the sun’s rays hid away
“will you stay,” even the tears asked
to make you stay, I gave my whole heart

One evening I saw you and lost my way….

A young man is walking through a barren, waterless stretch of land, worn out and alone, when he catches sight of a girl one evening and everything changes. That is where the song opens. The “waterless desert” he describes is not a real place so much as the dry, lost stretch his life had become before her. Sri Lankan song often uses the parched land, the place with no water, to stand for a heart with nothing to live for, and against that emptiness she appears like the one thing that gives it direction.

He calls her a single star that showed him the right road. Travelers once found their way by a star, and that is exactly what he means here: in all that lostness, one steady point of light told him which way to go. The way she came along is dressed in cherry blossoms, like a path scattered with flowers, and that image carries the lift of new love, the sense that the ground itself turned soft and beautiful the moment she walked it. He is careful to say the love he gave her had no cruelty in it, no heart that wounds or ruins. It was clean, and he gave it completely.

The last verse turns toward loss. He weeps at a sun that refuses to set, and the sun’s own rays hide themselves away, as if even the daylight cannot bear to look. In Sinhala song the setting sun and the gathering dusk almost always carry the weight of a parting, the day ending, something slipping out of reach. Here even his tears seem to ask her to stay, and his answer is that he gave his whole heart just to hold her there.

What the listener is left holding is the ache of someone who found his one direction in another person and is now afraid of losing it. The desert, the guiding star, the flower-strewn road and the dying light all carry the same simple feeling: she was the one thing that made a hard life worth walking, and he would give everything to keep her.