Aradhana

An invitation… an invitation…
Lost at the lonely wayside halt of life,
soothe this heart that sighs in its loneliness.
The joy that slipped away into the past,
gather it up and come to me once more.
An invitation… an invitation…

The fine carvings of love, cut into the wall of the heart,
have they worn away on the shore of time?
On the day life’s long journey left me with no one,
may the seven lotuses of love bloom again.
An invitation… an invitation…

Long ago, in the forest of our life together, in the milk scent of a small child,
in your warmth… I was born again.
On the day I take my leave of that broken throne,
may I find light again from the lamp of your eyes.
An invitation… an invitation…

A man who has walked a long way through life stops at an empty wayside halt and calls out to the one person who made the road bearable. The word he chooses, “aradhana,” carries real weight in Sinhala. It is the respectful invitation you offer someone you hold above yourself, the same word used when a monk is invited to preach, and he pairs it with “wadinna,” the honorific form of “come.” That alone tells you how he sees her.

The “mansala” of the opening verse is worth pausing on. It was the old rest house on the roadside where travellers broke a long journey for the night, and here the journey is life itself. He has reached one of those halts and found nobody waiting. The heart sighing in the dark is his own, and what he asks for is simple: bring back the happiness that slipped out of my hands somewhere in the past, and come.

The second verse turns to carving. Love cut its patterns into the wall of his heart the way stonework is carved into a temple wall, and he asks whether the tide of time has smoothed them flat. Then come the seven lotuses. In the Buddhist telling of the Bodhisattva’s birth, the child takes seven steps and a lotus opens under each one, so the image is about a blessed new beginning, not just a pretty flower. He wants love to open like that again, on the day the long road has left him with no one.

The last verse is the tender one. He remembers the early years of marriage as a forest, dense and alive, with the milk smell of a baby in the air, and he says her warmth made a new man of him. The broken throne is the small kingdom they built together, the household that once had a king and a queen in it and now stands in ruins. The closing image, her eyes as a lamp, comes from the oil lamp lit in a Sri Lankan home at dusk: a modest light, enough to see by, enough to hold the dark back a little. That is the whole of his request. He is not asking for the old life restored, only for enough light from her to walk the rest of the way.