Aradana Lyrics by Amaradeva

Stranded in the lonely wayside rest of life,
alone, sighing, a thirst caught somewhere in between,
take the happiness that slipped away into the past and come back to me again.
A plea… a plea…

The lovely dreams we once wove crumble today like falling walls,
have they faded away… o… oo… o… o…
on the shore of time.
On the day I was left forlorn on life’s long road,
may the seven lotuses of love bloom once more.
A plea… a plea…

Back then, in the sweet milky fragrance of our young years, we took up our life together,
in your warmth… ea… ee… ea… ea…
we were born anew.
On the day you took your leave in that royal blaze and went away,
may light come to me again from the lamps of your eyes.
A plea… a plea…

This is the cry of someone left behind, a man calling out to the one he loved and lost, begging her to come back to him. The word that rings through the whole song, “aradhana,” is a plea, an invocation, the way you would call out to someone you can no longer reach. He is not singing about a passing sadness. He is grieving a life partner who is gone, and the song is his prayer that she return, even if it has to be in another life.

Right from the start he gives us where he stands. He calls life a “thani mansala,” a lonely wayside rest-house, the kind of roadside inn travellers stop at for a night. To a Sri Lankan ear that image says everything: life is just a brief halt on a long journey, and he is stuck there alone, sighing, with a thirst inside him that nothing fills. He asks her to gather up the happiness that slipped away into the past and walk back into that empty room with it.

The middle of the song is where the loss really opens up. The dreams the two of them once wove together, he calls them “ketayam,” fine embroidered patterns, are crumbling now like walls coming down, washed away “on the shore of time” the way the sea wears down everything left at its edge. He remembers being suddenly orphaned, “anaatha,” left with no one, on life’s long road. And against all of that he sets one fragile hope: that the “seven lotuses of love” might bloom again. The lotus opening is the standing Sinhala image for love and tenderness coming back to life, and seven gives it a sense of something whole and sacred, a complete love restored.

The last verse is the most tender and the most heartbreaking, because it reaches back to the beginning and across into a next life at the same time. He remembers their early years together, the “kiri suwanda,” the sweet milky scent of innocence and youth, when they first joined their lives as a married couple and felt as if they had been born anew in each other’s warmth. Then comes the line that holds the grief: the day she “took her leave in that royal blaze and went away,” the blaze being the funeral pyre, dressed in the dignity Sinhala tradition gives the dead. And still he does not let go. He ends asking that the lamps of her eyes give him their light once more. It is a plea for reunion beyond this life, the quiet Buddhist hope that two people bound by love will find each other again somewhere down the long road of saṃsāra. That is what makes the song ache so much: it is not a goodbye, it is a refusal to say goodbye.