Mini Gauma Lyrics by Anton Jones

Give me the money so I can go out wearing the dress
Don’t drag your feet, walk a little, hurry along
Try it on tight to my body, the short one, and let me see
Put it on, the mini gauma, put it on //

This is how Lili, my lady, says it to me
These days who in the country wears a “mini gauma”?
How am I supposed to walk down the main road wearing one?
“I want a dress too, yes, I want a mini gauma.”
Why on earth are you going looking for a mini gauma right now?
Lili, my dear, why set my chest on fire?
You wear a mini gauma only after you’ve died, my lady
The moment I said that, my lady boiled up at me

Give me the money….. /

I keep remembering now how strange my lady’s ways are
Without anyone being dead, she goes hunting for a mini gauma
She wouldn’t take no for an answer, kept on begging and begging
So at the coffin shop I went and asked for a mini gauma
They gave me a mini gauma along with a coffin too
A car came with it as well, and I got into a fix
“Come close to the house, let a crowd gather all around”
My lady, seeing this, came out wailing in a loud voice

Give me the money….. /

“What in heaven’s name has happened to you?
What’s a coffin for, who in our house has died today?”
The moment she asked, her eyes popped like fish leaping in a river
This is how I answered my lady:
“You get a mini gauma when you buy a coffin,
that’s why, Lili, I brought you both.
By ‘mini gauma’ I meant a short shroud, like a pillowcase.”
My lady said yes, now I understand the fool’s errand I ran

Give me the money….. /

This is a comedy song, and the whole joke turns on one word that means two different things in Sinhala. “Mini gauma” can mean a mini-skirt, the short modern dress a fashionable woman wants, but “mini” on its own also means a corpse, so “mini gauma” can just as easily mean a burial shroud, the cloth a dead body is wrapped in. The song plays that confusion for laughs from start to finish.

A wife, Lili, hands her husband money and orders him to go buy her a “mini gauma” so she can wear it out, short and tight and stylish. He is baffled and a little horrified, because to his ear she is demanding a shroud. He tells her that nobody wears a “mini gauma” these days, that he can hardly walk down the main road carrying one, and finally blurts out the line that lands the joke, you only wear a mini gauma after you are dead. That sets her off, and she boils over at him.

Trying to please her, he goes to the only place that sells a “mini gauma” as he understands the word, the coffin shop, and comes home with a shroud, a coffin, and even the hearse, telling the neighbours to gather round. Lili runs out wailing, sure that someone has died, her eyes popping wide. The line about her eyes is a Sinhala way of picturing pure shock, like fish leaping and thrashing in a river, the whole face jumping in alarm. When he explains that he brought the shroud and the coffin together because that is what “mini gauma” meant to him, she finally gets it, and admits the whole errand was a foolish mix-up.

The fun of the song is in two people speaking the same word and picturing completely opposite things, one a short party dress, the other a death shroud. He even spells it out at the end, comparing the little shroud to a pillowcase, just to drive home how far apart their two meanings were. It is a light, silly piece that depends entirely on a Sinhala pun, the kind of wordplay humour that does not survive a plain translation, which is why the corpse-versus-skirt double meaning is the thing to hold on to.