Epa Kandulel Sala Lyrics by Athma Liyanage

Don’t shed your tears
and spoil those eyes of yours.
Flowers spill their fragrance
and kiss your lovely face.

Don’t heave your sighs
and wound your heart.
Don’t heave your sighs
and wound your heart.
The koel sings its song
and it soothes your mind.
and it soothes your mind.

Don’t shed your tears
and spoil those eyes of yours.
Flowers spill their fragrance
and kiss your lovely face.

Don’t lock your love away
and let it turn into a mirage.
Don’t lock your love away
and let it turn into a mirage.
Let your heart stay an altar
until your destined prince comes.
until your destined prince comes.

Don’t shed your tears
and spoil those eyes of yours.
Flowers spill their fragrance
and kiss your lovely face.
Flowers spill their fragrance
and kiss your lovely face.
Flowers spill their fragrance
and kiss your lovely face.

Flowers spill their fragrance
and kiss your lovely face.

This is a tender, consoling song, a gentle voice speaking to a young woman who is hurting in love. She is waiting for someone, and the waiting has started to break her. The whole song is one soft plea: please don’t cry, please don’t sigh, don’t let this love wither while you wait.

The comfort comes wrapped in everyday images from the world around her. When the voice says flowers are spilling their fragrance and kissing her face, it is telling her that beauty and life are still reaching for her, that the world has not turned away even if the person she loves has not yet come. The koel, the bird whose call Sri Lankans hear as the sound of longing and of the season turning, sings its song here not to deepen her sadness but to settle her mind. Even the cry that usually means yearning is offered to her as something that can calm her.

The strongest line is the one about the mirage. The voice begs her not to shut her love away and let it become a “miriguwa,” a mirage, the shimmer of water in the heat that looks real and vanishes when you reach it. The fear is that if she hides her love and lets the waiting harden her, the love itself will turn into a thing that was never really there. Instead she is told to keep her heart like an altar, something kept ready and sacred, until “himi kumaru,” her destined one, her own prince, finally arrives.

What the listener is left holding is a kind of patient hope. The song does not promise that he will come soon. It only asks her to guard her heart and her tears, to stay open and unhardened, so that when love does arrive she still has a heart soft enough to receive it.