Maim Game Weerawarune Lyrics by Damith Asanka

Ho……….

Heroes of the minefield, who do you belong to?
Cross over to that side and you’re done for, you belong to the gun
We kept calling it peace while waging war, but peace never woke
This is no lie, all of us are tangled up in the very same place

Even back in Jaffna’s library days, you said no to Sinhala books
The palmyra trees stripped of their fronds,
have you still not tasted the sweetness of palmyra toddy?
Death is what we inherit in this life, sitting with our heads bowed
Won’t we earn the grace of coming to Jaffna and going home again?
Won’t we earn that grace?

Are you afraid to come and sit under the Bo tree at Pita Kotuwa?
Can’t you spare a little time to make a vow at Kataragama?
Take the train to Vavuniya, board it at Maradana
Won’t you too earn the grace of coming over to Colombo’s side?
Won’t you too earn that grace?

This is a song about Sri Lanka after the war, and about the wall that still stands between the Sinhala south and the Tamil north once the fighting stopped. It opens by calling out to the “heroes of the minefield,” the fighters on both sides, and asking a hard question: who do you really belong to? The answer it gives is bitter. Cross the line and you are finished, you belong to the gun. For all the years people kept saying the word “peace,” real peace never actually woke up and arrived. And the saddest line of the verse refuses to take sides at all: this is no lie, every one of us got tangled up in the same mess together.

The middle verse reaches back into real memory. The burning of the Jaffna library in 1981, when thousands of irreplaceable Tamil books and manuscripts went up in flames, sits behind the line about refusing Sinhala books, a wound that hardened the divide long before the war proper. The palmyra (thal) tree is the everyday emblem of the northern Tamil homeland, its tall fronds, its sap that becomes toddy. To picture the palmyra stripped bare, its fronds gone, and to ask whether the singer has still never tasted its toddy, is to say two communities have lived on one island for generations and still never shared each other’s simple, ordinary sweetness. Underneath it all runs the line that what this life has handed everyone is death, heads bowed in grief. And then comes the plea that the song keeps returning to: will we ever earn the merit, the grace, of simply being able to travel up to Jaffna and come home again in peace?

The last verse turns the same invitation the other way, southward. It names the sacred and the ordinary side by side. Will you be afraid to come and sit under the Bo tree at Pita Kotuwa in Colombo? Can you not spare a little time to make a vow at Kataragama, the great pilgrimage shrine that Sinhala, Tamil, Muslim and Hindu devotees have all honoured for centuries? Then it gets wonderfully practical, almost like giving directions to a friend: take the train to Vavuniya, you board it right there at Maradana station. The whole point is that the journey is short and easy, the only thing stopping it is fear and suspicion.

The word the chorus keeps reaching for is “pin,” merit or grace, the Buddhist idea of the good you earn by good acts. Used here it becomes something gentler and shared: the grace both sides could earn just by crossing over, visiting, sitting together, treating the other’s land and shrines as places you are welcome. What the listener is left holding is not anger but a tired, honest longing, a wish that after all the loss, north and south could finally be free to walk into each other’s homes.