Nissara Sansara Heene

In an empty dream of saṃsāra (the cycle of rebirth), somewhere in the past
I can feel that you are there
Will there ever be a day we meet, a day I see you again
Through all three watches of the night I keep asking
(Every night you sleep beside her
And without you here, it is your heart I keep kissing…..//)

(The warm kisses belong to her now
But the love is still here in our hearts…..//)
Even the times I see you, my whole heart catches fire….
(In the drizzle of this grey, misty wind I still feel your breath…//)
In this cold that leaves my heart shaking, let me hide inside your chest…..

An empty saṃsāra……

A young woman lies awake all night with one question she cannot put down: will there ever be a day when the two of them meet again. She is not talking about a man who died or moved away. He is alive and close enough that she still runs into him, and every night he sleeps beside another woman. That is the wound the song sits in, and she says it out loud in the first verse instead of hiding it.

The line that gives the song its ache is the one about kissing his heart. She cannot touch him, so she keeps the part of him she still believes belongs to her. His warmth, his kisses, all of that has gone to someone else now, and she admits it without bitterness. What she refuses to give up is the love itself, which she insists is still sitting in both their hearts, hers and his. Whether he agrees is left open. She is telling herself as much as she is telling him.

The imagery is worth slowing down for. Calling life a “nissara sansara”, an empty or worthless saṃsāra, is the Buddhist frame a Sri Lankan listener hears at once: this whole round of birth and death is hollow, so a love that could not survive one lifetime becomes one more proof of how little any of it holds. The “thun yaame”, the three watches of the night, is old temple and poetry language for a night spent entirely without sleep, from dusk to dawn. Then there is the “mandaram” weather, the low grey overcast with fine drizzle that hangs over the hill country. In Sinhala song that sky is the standing image for a mood you cannot shake off, and here it carries his breath back to her in the wind.

The last line is the one that hurts. She is shivering in that cold and asks to hide inside his chest, the one place she knows she is no longer allowed to go. Then the song circles back to the opening words about the empty saṃsāra and stops there, unresolved, which is exactly how the feeling works. Nothing is fixed by the end. She is still awake, still cold, still asking.