Malee Lyrics (මාලී) by Athma Liyanage

Malee, dream princess
drifting through the endless hours of night
swaying in secret on the breeze
love that wanders in the dark

On the breeze, in secret, from afar, it stirs my heart
a warm fragrance floats and wraps around my body
hidden from my eyes, unseen, where has she gone?

Is she a dewy teardrop trembling secretly in the dark?
a gleaming moonbeam drawn across the dew?
or a shadow my own eyes have conjured, an illusion?

This is a dream of a person more than a portrait of one. “Malee” is called a “dream princess,” and everything about her is weightless and half-there: she drifts through the endless hours of the night, sways secretly on the breeze, a love that “wanders in the dark.” From the first line she is less a woman standing before him than a presence moving at the edge of sleep.

The middle verse is all sensation without solid form. Something reaches him on the breeze and stirs his heart from far away; a warm fragrance floats up and wraps around his body. Yet the moment he looks for her she is “hidden from my eyes, unseen,” and he is left asking where she has gone. He can feel her, smell her, sense her, but never quite hold or see her.

The song ends on three beautiful, unanswered questions, and this is its heart. Is she a dewdrop trembling in the dark, a moonbeam sliding across the dew, or simply a shadow his own eyes have conjured? Dew and moonlight are the most fragile, fleeting things in the Sinhala poetic world, gone by morning, impossible to grasp, and the last guess, “an illusion my eyes have made,” admits she may not be real at all. What the listener is left with is the ache of longing for someone who lives more in dream and memory than in the waking world, so lovely and so intangible that the lover cannot tell whether she exists or whether he has dreamed her.