Rahase Hadana Lyrics by Clarence WijewardenaNeela Wickramasinghe

Our feelings that cry in secret
The world doesn’t know what we long for
On nights when the pale moon rises
We shine like the stars
Alone, our aching sighs of love

Bound in love back in the tender days of youth
You will never fade from my mind, always there in my heart
The sweet, sweet pain of love

Our feelings that cry in secret….

Wrapped together like shadows in a moonlit night’s dream
Let us stay, my dear, joined as we always have been
The sweet, sweet pain of love

Our feelings that cry in secret….
Our feelings that cry in secret

This is a love song that goes back and forth between a man and a woman, two people who have loved each other since they were young and are carrying that love quietly, where no one else can see it. The opening line sets the whole mood: their feelings “cry in secret.” It is a love nobody knows about, full of longing they keep to themselves, and right away you feel both the closeness and the loneliness of it.

The song leans on the night sky to say what the heart feels. When the pale moon rises, the two of them shine like the stars, far apart in the dark but quietly lit by the same love. In Sinhala song the moon and stars are the familiar images for tenderness and for two souls who belong together even when they are kept apart, so the picture of stars shining on a moonlit night is really about two lovers holding on to each other from a distance. Their sighs are described as “alone and aching,” the kind of love that hurts even as it comforts.

The middle verses look back. They fell in love in the “tender days of youth,” that first early love you never forget, and they promise that the other will never fade from the heart. There is a line that keeps returning, “the sweet, sweet pain of love,” and that small phrase holds the whole song. Love here is not pure joy. It aches because it has to stay hidden, but the ache itself is sweet, because it comes from loving someone deeply. By the last verse they wish to stay “wrapped together like shadows in a dream,” joined the way they always have been, a gentle, almost dreamlike way of saying they want to belong to each other forever.

What you are left holding is that quiet, hidden tenderness: a love that lives in secret, lit only by the moon and the stars, sweet and painful at the same time, and never wanting to let go.