Deepawali Data Lyrics by Asanka Priyamantha Peiris

On Deepavali day, take the Deepavali moon and
come home to Matara, past Yapa Patuna (Jaffna).
We cook the fish curry you love most with the Sinhala rice,
and we are all here with the village relatives, watching the road for you.

You were a child who feared the firecracker bangs, and that ache for you stays in my heart.
We stayed shut up in the big family house, so very sad.
Now the fire has died down.
Come home, son, and bring the little ones.

Your heart was lost to that goddess of a girl you saw near the kovil (Hindu temple).
You left without a word, because we had not given our blessing.
Now the anger has cooled.
Weave a palmyra mat too and come from Jaffna.

On Deepavali day, take the Deepavali moon…

This is a family calling their boy home. The voice is a parent in Matara, in the deep south, speaking to a son who left in anger and has been gone a long while. The occasion is Deepavali, the festival of lights, and the whole song is shaped like a letter or a plea sent out on that day: come home, the fight is over, we miss you.

The opening lines do something tender. “Take the Deepavali moon and come home” is not a literal instruction, it is the way a parent who longs for someone says “let the festival itself carry you back to us.” They have cooked the fish curry he loves with the rice he grew up on, and the relatives are gathered, all of them watching the road, the way a family waits at the gate for one face that has not come. That image of watching the road holds the whole ache of the song.

The middle verse opens the old wound gently. He was a small boy once who was frightened by the bang of firecrackers, and the parent still carries that picture of him. “Now the fire has died down” works on two levels at once. The Deepavali fireworks have burned out for the night, and so has the family’s anger. The quarrel is named plainly in the third verse: he fell for a girl he first saw near the kovil, the Hindu temple, and the family, being Sinhala, had not given their blessing, so he slipped away without a word and went north. The Jaffna and the talipot mat woven from palmyra are the markers of where he has gone and the Tamil life he has made there, and the parent now asks him to bring that life home too, the little grandchildren and all.

What makes the song land is that it is the parents who bend first. They do not demand an apology. They simply say the anger has cooled, the food is ready, the moon is up, and there is a place at the big house for him and the family he chose. Underneath the festival and the long bus road past Jaffna is something very ordinary and very hard, a parent admitting they were wrong to stand in the way of their child’s love, and asking him, on the night of lights, to just come home.