Sokari Lyrics by Chinthy

(You’re pretty and full of cheek, Sokari, don’t go away.
Lick the sweet honey-food off your tongue, it’s good to smoke ganja.
Don’t let go of me when heaven’s pleasures are right here beside you.
Lie back face-up on the bed, that’s the good way to be…//)

Rap

Holding you by the waist, soothing you, putting a chained necklace on you,
how could she bear this sorrow, crying, shedding tears.
The flower scent that makes the mind drunk wept and flowed like a stream.
Until the heart comes loose and is flung away, the kisses kept coming.

You’re pretty and full of cheek……

Rap

You’re pretty and full of cheek……
Holding you by the waist, soothing you……
You’re pretty and full of cheek……

“Sokari” borrows its name from one of Sri Lanka’s oldest folk performances, the Sokari dance-drama, where a cheeky, beautiful woman is at the center of all the teasing and trouble. The song plays on that: the voice here is a man coaxing a lively, sharp-tongued woman not to walk out on him. He calls her pretty and full of cheek, the kind of woman who answers back, and the whole song is his attempt to charm her into staying.

His pitch is all pleasure and persuasion. He tells her there’s sweet food to taste and ganja to share, that the joys people imagine in heaven are sitting right here beside her, so why let go of him. It is loose, playful and a little reckless, the talk of a young man more interested in the moment than in anything lasting.

Then the mood turns. He holds her by the waist, calms her down, puts a necklace on her, and yet she is crying. The line about “the flower scent that makes the mind drunk” weeping and flowing like a stream is the song’s most loaded image. In Sinhala the fragrance of a flower stands for a woman’s sweetness and her bloom, so a perfume that “weeps and flows away” is her tenderness being spent and slipping out of her, even as the kisses keep coming. There is a sadness running underneath the flirting: she gives in, but it costs her something.

That tension is what gives the song its bite. On the surface it is a swaggering, seductive piece, a man certain he can win her over with charm and pleasure. Underneath, the tears and the flower draining away hint that what he calls heaven leaves her undone, her heart “coming loose and flung away.” The listener is left holding both at once, the bravado of the chase and the quiet cost paid by the woman being chased.