Sidadiye Nuba Dutuwata

You saw me in the city, but I’m from the village
I’m going with my mother to worship in Kandy
It was your beauty, those soft cheeks, that I kept looking at
Were you laughing to mock me, a poor man?….//

My trousers are torn, but it doesn’t really show
Mother stitched them up well, so I’m not worried about that
The pin holding the top button doesn’t show either
But my slippers are worn right down, and if you see them, that’s no good……

You saw me in the city…..

I got home, yes I got home, but how, I don’t know
Your face, like a bakini flower, I can’t forget it
I don’t know when I’ll ever go to Kandy again
I wasn’t crying, so how the tears came, I don’t know…..

You saw me in the city…..

A village boy is on a trip to Kandy with his mother, going to worship, and somewhere in the middle of that crowd a city girl looks at him and laughs. That is the whole event of the song. Nothing else happens. He goes home and cannot stop thinking about it, and by the last verse he is standing there with wet eyes not even sure why.

The hurt in the first verse comes from a gap every Sri Lankan knows without needing it explained: sidadiya, the city, against gammanaya, the village. He tells her straight away that she may have seen him among the city crowd, but he does not belong to it. So when she laughs, he cannot read it as a friendly laugh. He asks whether she was laughing at a poor boy, and the question is really him asking himself.

The second verse is the part that stays with you. Instead of talking about his feelings, he goes through his clothes item by item, like someone checking himself in a mirror before he is judged. The tear in his trousers is fine, his mother sewed it well. The safety pin doing the work of a missing top button is hidden. He gets through the whole list reassuring himself, and then his slippers defeat him. They are worn down to nothing, and there is no covering that up. In one plain line the song says everything about being poor in front of someone you want to impress.

Then the last verse turns soft. He walked home without noticing the road. Her face, which he compares to a delicate flower, will not leave him. He knows the trip to Kandy was a rare thing for a family like his, so seeing her again is not something he can arrange. That is why the tears arrive on their own, before he has admitted to himself that this was more than being laughed at.

The song never gives him a reply, a name, or a second meeting, and that is why it works. It sits with a small humiliation that turned, without permission, into liking someone.