Sarath Sande

Film: Julia (2009)

Carry a soft fragrance into this night of the autumn moon
Whisper a fond love story to the wind
From wara flower to flower, weave a canopy of blossoms
Teach me a lover’s meditation

As the birds of feeling settle into the nest
the birds of thought will take flight
Your eyes will light up in an instant
and that light will spread right through mine

Even if the fire of summer comes, it doesn’t matter
it can’t get in the way of us
There is nowhere this maddening mist won’t go
and it stays here, in our arms

There is this much warmth inside the cold
if the heart is strong enough to hold it
There is that much room in these two arms
and dreams come washing over the bed we call ours

The rain that falls in winter doesn’t matter
we are shelter enough for each other
The snow petals of love never end in that sky
and we have only us

There is this much warmth inside the cold
if the heart is strong enough to hold it
There is that much room in these two arms
and dreams come washing over the bed we call ours

Carry a soft fragrance into this night of the autumn moon
Whisper a fond love story to the wind
From wara flower to flower, weave a canopy of blossoms
Teach me a lover’s meditation

(As the birds of feeling settle into the nest
the birds of thought will take flight
Your eyes will light up in an instant
and that light will spread right through mine…)

Two lovers are talking to each other under a clear autumn moon, and the whole song is one long request: stay close, and let the year do whatever it wants to us. Nothing dramatic happens in it. There is no separation, no quarrel, no distance. It is simply a couple deciding that the weather outside has no say in what happens between them.

The opening is a list of small, tender instructions. Hold a soft fragrance for this moonlit night, murmur a love story quietly enough that only the wind carries it, gather flowers into a canopy. That flower canopy is the mal wiyana, the decorated cloth-and-flower ceiling Sri Lankans hang over a wedding poruwa and at temple festivals, so asking for one made blossom by blossom is a quiet way of saying make this feel like a wedding, just for the two of us. Then comes the loveliest line in the song, a request to be taught a lover’s meditation. Bhavana is a Buddhist word, the discipline of holding the mind on one thing until everything else falls away, and the singer borrows it for love. Teach me to concentrate on you like that.

The second verse turns the mind into a birdcage. When the birds of feeling come home to roost, the birds of thought fly off, which is a neat way of saying that once the heart is full the head goes quiet. And the light works in one direction only: your eyes catch fire first, and my eyes are where that light spreads. He is saying he has nothing of his own to give, he only carries what she starts.

Then the seasons arrive, and they are the old poetic seasons of classical Sinhala verse rather than anything Sri Lanka actually gets. Summer’s fire cannot reach them. The winter rain does not matter because they are each other’s roof, the word sevana being the same shade a tree throws over you. Even snow shows up, which no one in Colombo has ever seen falling, and that is the point: love here is imagined as endless white petals coming down out of the sky forever. The mist that drives you mad is welcome, because it settles in their arms instead of chasing them off.

What holds the song together is the line that repeats. There is warmth hidden inside cold weather if your heart is strong enough to hold on, and there is exactly as much room in a pair of arms as you need. It closes on a small, satisfied thought, that the two of them are enough, and everything else is just seasons passing outside the window.