Ma Bala Kale Lyrics by CT Fernando

In my childhood, on my mother’s lap,
the rhythm she rocked me to, I still remember it…//

The love she showed, holding me close to her chest,
my mother, whose love never fell short.
The advice she gave, I still bathe in that river of honey,
I still remember the sound of her songs.
In my childhood, on my mother’s lap,
the rhythm she rocked me to, I still remember it.
In my childhood….

“Think of learning as your true wealth,”
weaving in patience, kindness, and good virtues,
“Cast away deceit, conceit, pride, and envy,”
this was how she gave me her advice….

In my childhood, on my mother’s lap,
the rhythm she rocked me to, I still remember it.
In my childhood….

“This little Lanka belongs to you, my son,
keeping her safe rests in a son’s own hands.
Raise up your love for this country and its people,
and protect her good name always, my son….”

In my childhood….

This is a grown man looking back on his mother, remembering himself as a small boy on her lap. The song opens in that warmest of places, a child being rocked to sleep, and the man tells us that even now he can still feel the rhythm of it and hear the songs she used to sing over him. It is a tribute to a mother, and to everything she planted in him before he was old enough to understand it.

The most beautiful image comes early. He says the advice she gave him is like a river of honey he still bathes in. In Sinhala, “මී ගඟුල”, a stream of honey, is the picture of something endlessly sweet and nourishing, and to bathe in it is to be carried and washed over by it. So her words were not a lecture he sat through once. They were sweetness he has been steeped in his whole life, still soaking into him long after she spoke them.

The middle of the song is her voice, the actual things she told him. Treat learning as your real wealth. Hold on to patience, kindness, and good character. Throw out deceit, pride, conceit, and envy. These are the quiet, ordinary virtues a Sri Lankan mother hands down, not grand ideas but the daily shape of a decent life, and he repeats them word for word because they became the frame he grew up inside.

Then the song widens out in a way that may surprise a non-Sri-Lankan listener. The mother’s last lesson is about the country itself. She calls Lanka “මේ පුංචි ලංකා”, this little Lanka, the same tender, possessive word a parent uses for a small child, and she tells her son that keeping the island safe rests in the hands of her children. The love he learned on her lap is meant to flow outward, from mother, to family, to the land and its people. By the end the two mothers have quietly become one, the woman who rocked him and the homeland he is asked to guard, and what he is left holding is gratitude that is also a duty: to protect her good name, always.