Suragana Wes Wala Lyrics by Clarence Wijewardena

In the guise of a celestial maiden,
swaying her hips,
look at the dancing women,
my eyes turn to bees drawn to them.

Across a breast tied with a swan-feather band,
what is the secret it whispers?
With her trembling waist-chain on,
the wonder of her never ends.

In the guise of a celestial maiden.

Her dark, curving eyebrows like a bent bow,
both eyes drawing close,
as I watch, lost in the pleasure of it,
she has enchanted the minds of everyone.

In the guise of a celestial maiden.

This is an old, ornate Sinhala lyric that does one thing and does it beautifully: it watches a dancer move and tries to put her grace into words. The singer is a spectator caught by the sight of women dancing, and he describes one of them as a suragana, a celestial maiden from heaven, as if a being from another world has come down and put on human form to dance in front of him. That single image sets the whole tone. The point is not that she is loved or longed for, but that she is so lovely in motion that she seems unreal.

The writing leans on the elevated, classical Sinhala that lyricists used to evoke court dancers and the apsaras of myth, so the pleasure of the song is in its picture-making. He says his eyes turn into bees the moment he sees her. In Sinhala poetry the bee that hovers over a flower is the standing image of someone helplessly drawn to beauty, unable to look away, and that is exactly how he means it, his gaze settling on her the way a bee settles on a bloom. The details he picks out are the ornaments of a traditional dancer: the thisara patin, a band patterned with the swan, worn across the chest, and the mewula, the waist-chain or hip-belt that sways and chimes as she dances. He notices the chest-band as if it holds a secret it is murmuring, and the trembling waist-chain as proof that the wonder of her simply does not end.

Then he turns to her face. He compares her dark, arched eyebrows to a drawn bow, an old comparison in which the curved brow is the bow and a glance from the eye beneath it is the arrow, so the line quietly says her very look strikes home. With her two eyes drawn near and her brows like that, she has, in his words, intoxicated the minds of everyone watching. It is not a private feeling but a shared one, a whole gathering held by one dancer.

What the listener is left with is not heartbreak or yearning but pure wonder, the feeling of sitting in front of something so graceful that the only way to describe it is to reach for heaven. The recurring line, in the guise of a celestial maiden, comes back like the turn of the dance itself, each time pulling you back to that first astonished thought: surely no ordinary woman moves like this.