Sabandini Lyrics by Abhisheka Wimalaweera

My beloved, I am yours //
full of loving, playful mischief,
making my vows to you,
I sit here counting the days
my beloved, I am yours //

Won’t you give that smile of yours
to be framed and kept? //
The patterns painted on your nails
around your lotus-bud fingertips,
covered over with a fold of cloth,
I wait, gazing at my dream
my restless dream,
its colours have faded
come quickly, quickly,
the colours of my dream have woken again…

By your love,
by that treasure you gave me,
I sit here counting the days
my beloved, I am yours //

In the lonely silence of your anklet-bells,
come quickly //
the patterns painted on your nails
around your lotus-bud fingertips,
covered over with a fold of cloth,
I wait, gazing at my dream
my restless dream,
the colours of my dream have woken…

Are you the eighth note of the scale?
Aren’t you right here, so close beside me?
I sit here counting the days
my beloved, I am yours //

The water-lily scent that bloomed
on a sleepless night, isn’t it yours?
The water-lily scent that bloomed
on a sleepless night, isn’t it my own?

A soft, yearning love song whose refrain is a simple vow: sabandini, maa obe, my beloved, I am yours. The singer is full of affectionate, playful devotion, making his promises to her and passing the days simply counting them until she comes. Longing here is patient and tender rather than desperate.

The middle fills with delicate, sensuous images of the woman he waits for. He wishes he could frame and keep her smile; he pictures the patterns painted on her lotus-bud fingertips and the fold of cloth, and says he waits gazing at his dream of her, a dream whose colours fade when she is away and wake again at the thought of her return. He begs her to come quickly, drawn by the lonely silence where her anklet-bells should be ringing, her absence measured by a sound he cannot hear.

The last turns lift the beloved into something almost cosmic. Are you the eighth note, he asks, the one beyond the familiar seven, the note that completes the scale? And he wonders whether the water-lily scent that bloomed on his sleepless night is hers, or has become his own, the two of them so merged he can no longer tell them apart. It is a gentle, worshipful song of waiting, sung by Abhisheka Wimalaweera to a melody by Gimhana Komangoda.