Mayam Tharu Rene Lyrics by Amal Perera

Freed from the spell of an illusion-filled night of stars,
bound now to that risen moon.
Free of the spell, yet I cannot pull my hands away,
my mind today is sunk deep in love.
A coldness has settled in, so I cannot sleep at night.
It’s all because of you that I’m still standing here, watching the road for you.

If you were ever mine, I would never hurt you, even in my madness for you.

In my textbook you wrote in fragrant letters,
you were the one who sang that song of longing.
The note tucked in the corner of that book was for you,
it was you who saw these feelings of love once more.
In that love story my eyes spoke of every day,
wasn’t there some real affection there, tell me?
When will these wishes of mine ever come true?
My dream burned away in the fire of sorrow.

In the milk-tooth days when my heart was tied to flower-dreams,
I stopped beside one single dream.
When your small eyes shone like stars,
my heart fell silent and couldn’t speak.
Even now that I know, if you have drifted far away,
I will stay here and bear the ache forever.
I’ll keep my wishes unspoken,
because friendship is better than losing you for good…

A young man is standing at the side of the road late at night, still watching for a girl who is most likely never coming. That is where this song lives, in the long, sleepless stretch after a first love that never quite became his. He opens by saying he has woken from an illusion, the “night of magical stars” that early love casts over you, and yet he still cannot pull his hands free of it. He knows it was a dream, and he is still drowning in it anyway.

The most tender thing he says is that even in his madness for her, he would never have hurt her if she had been his. That one line tells you the whole shape of him. This is not a bitter love or a possessive one. It is the kind of devotion that wants the other person to be safe and happy more than it wants to be satisfied.

The memories he reaches for are all small and schoolboy-sweet, and that is the point. He remembers her writing in the margin of his textbook in “fragrant letters,” a lovely Sinhala image where suwanda, fragrance, stands for something cherished and intimate, the way a kept note still carries the feeling of the person who wrote it. He remembers her singing his song, the little folded letter in the corner of the book. The “milk-tooth days” (kirikoodu, baby teeth) place all of this back in childhood or early adolescence, the time of first crushes, when his heart was “tied to flower-dreams” and he stopped at just one of them, her. When her eyes shone like stars, he says, his heart went silent and could not speak. So many of us know that exact helplessness, loving someone and not being able to get a single word out.

By the end he has made his quiet decision. He cannot tell whether the affection he saw in her was ever real, and his dream has “burned away in the fire of sorrow,” but he chooses not to chase it. He will keep his wishes to himself and carry the ache rather than risk her. The last line is the heart of the whole song: friendship is better than losing her for good. It is the choice of someone who would rather stay near the person he loves, on any terms, than speak the truth and drive her away. That ache, holding everything back so as not to lose what little you have, is what the listener is left holding when the song ends.