Malata Bambareku Se Lyrics by Clarence Wijewardena

Like a bee to a flower,
you come into my mind.
Like the rays of the sun,
my heart smiles.
You are smiling.

In the moments when my heart sits withered with sorrow,
I think of you, and the sorrow cools and fades away.

The world grows bright, the night moves on,
and among a thousand voices, I remember you.

Like a bee to a flower …/

A young man can’t keep his thoughts off the girl he loves. They come to him on their own, again and again, and the first thing he reaches for to describe it is a bee and a flower. In Sinhala song the bee drawn to a blossom is the picture of helpless, natural attraction, the bee doesn’t choose to go, it simply cannot stay away. That is how she lives in his mind. He isn’t deciding to think of her; she just keeps arriving.

When he reaches for what her smile does to him, he turns to the sun. Her smile is like the sun’s rays, and at the sight of it his own heart smiles back. The warmth in that line is the whole point, where the moon in our songs is cool and calming, the sun here is light and heat that lifts him, a brightness that thaws something heavy inside.

The middle of the song is where the feeling deepens. He admits there are moments when his heart sits dried up and small with sorrow, the word he uses, melavi, is what happens to a flower that wilts. And the cure is simply remembering her. He thinks of her and the sadness cools and drains away. There’s nothing grand about it, just one person who has become the place his heart goes when it hurts.

By the end the days pass and the nights move on, and even in a crowd, among a thousand voices, hers is the one he keeps recalling. That’s what the song leaves you holding, the quiet steadiness of someone who has settled into a man’s mind, not as a storm of feeling but as the warm, ordinary thought that gets him through.