Sihina Lowe Lyrics by CT Fernando

In this dream world you made sweet, my bride,
your smile rises up, you, my bride
Showing your teeth like a girl of the gods,
my graceful one, dance for me in sweetness…//

My sorrowful sighs drift away
Sweet dreams and wishes came to me
My eyes are always turned toward you
That sweet melody of song
came to the lips of the bee
It is by your merit, it seems
In the poets’ deathless world
giving sweetness, killing my sorrow
my darling, you are the one I love
(In the temple of my heart, peace
my beautiful one who brings it
rose-flower princess, you are my beloved…//)

In this dream world…//

My sorrowful sighs…/

In this dream world…//

A man is singing to the woman he loves, and in his eyes she belongs to a world that is too perfect to be real, a dream world he says she herself has filled with sweetness. He calls her his manaali, his bride or betrothed, the way a Sinhala lover names the woman he means to spend his life with, so from the first line you know this is not a passing crush but the woman he has given his heart to.

The song works by lifting her out of the ordinary world and placing her among finer things. He compares her smile to that of a sura kella, a maiden of the gods, the celestial beauties of old verse, so when she laughs and shows her teeth she looks to him like something heavenly rather than human. He asks her to dance for him, light and graceful, and that image of her moving sweetly is what his whole feeling rests on.

Then he reaches for the world of poets, the amara loke, the deathless or immortal realm of the classical poets. In Sinhala this is the highest praise a lover can give: he is saying she belongs not in everyday life but in the world that poets sing about, the place where beauty never fades. The bee at her lips is the old image of the bambara, the bee drawn to a flower’s nectar, here the bee is the song itself, drawn to her sweetness, and he says it is only her good fortune, her pinen, her merit, that lets such sweetness exist. Her presence both gives him sweetness and quietly ends the sorrow he was carrying.

By the closing lines he calls her the peace inside the temple of his heart and a rose-flower princess, his rosa mal kumari, and that brings the feeling home. She is not just lovely to look at, she is the calm at the center of him, the one who turns his sighing sorrow into something gentle. It is a tender, old-fashioned love song, the kind where a man worships the woman he loves by setting her among the gods and the poets, and tells her plainly that she is his beloved.