Kambi Thappeta Hira Karagena Maa

Shut in behind the wire wall, I look up at the sky, mother
Tell me what wrong I did, at least you, come to me along the wind, mother
When the evening sun goes down in the blue sky, the sound of the temple in Kandy, mother
I grab my plate and run to the queue, and I only get to pray late at night, mother

My head resting on an old cotton cloth, finding a little comfort on a reed mat
I have known hardship since I was small, I know the taste of jackfruit seeds well
Mother cannot come to Kandy on her own, Bogambara is like a wide ocean
I am cutting mother’s name into my chest, with a bunch of needles it will look fine

Shut in behind the wire wall ….

Everyone in the ward is just the same, eaten up with regret, crying alone
Kings, rich men and ministers only see the world once they come here and see sorrow
In the dead of night in that lonely house, I can picture you crying
I knock my head against the iron bars, feeling the fire in my chest

Shut in behind the wire wall ….

A man is sitting inside Bogambara prison in Kandy, looking up at the one piece of sky he can still see, and talking to his mother. Every line ends with “amme”, and that single word carries the whole song. He is not asking to be let out. He is asking his mother to come to him somehow, even if only as a breath of wind, and to tell him what it was that he did wrong.

The details he chooses are the small ones that fill a prisoner’s day. The sun setting, the sound of the temple in Kandy drifting over the wall at evening time, and then the plate in his hand and the run to the food queue. Worship, which back home would have come at dusk with the family, gets pushed to the middle of the night, when he is finally alone with himself. That reordering of an ordinary Sri Lankan day is how he tells you what has been taken from him.

The second verse reaches back further. An old printed cloth folded under his head for a pillow, a reed mat, and the taste of jackfruit seeds, which is the taste of a poor village childhood where boiled kos ata filled the gap when rice was short. He is saying that suffering is not new to him. Then he takes a bundle of sewing needles and cuts his mother’s name into his own chest, the crude tattoo that men in Sri Lankan prisons give themselves. With no way to reach her, he puts her name on the only surface he owns.

Bogambara becomes a wide ocean in his mind, too much water for an old village woman to cross alone, so he knows she will not be coming. Looking around the ward he sees his own face on every man there, each one sitting with his regret. Kings, wealthy men and ministers, he says, learn what the world really is only when they land in a place like this. The song ends with him beating his head against the bars, not out of anger at his sentence, but because he can see his mother crying alone at home and cannot go to her.