Alawantha Neth Wida Lyrics by Dayasiri Jayasekara

Casting your loving eyes, raising a smile
A moon maiden, lovely, shining on a pearl-white mat
Heart-binding, full of joy, smiling on the pearl-white mat

Brushing your face softly with stolen moonlight
Dressing yourself in a gown of flowers
Hiding your starry eyes above the lattice door
I remember, we smiled again
I remember… you smiled once more

Wrapped in a cool ripple of breeze
We sit, having left the garden of wildflowers behind
Erased from memory, the way we loved
I remember the way you left me
I remember… the way you once were

Casting your loving eyes…

A young man is turning a girl he once loved over in his mind, the way you keep returning to someone long after they have gone. He pictures her smiling, her eyes soft and full of affection, and he can almost see her sitting there in front of him, glowing. The whole song is built out of these small remembered pictures, and underneath every one of them is the quiet ache that she is no longer his.

He reaches for the moon to describe her. He calls her a “moon maiden” and says her face is touched with stolen moonlight, and in Sinhala song the moon is the standing image of a calm, cooling beauty, light that softens the dark rather than dazzles. So he isn’t saying she was striking so much as that she was gentle and lovely to be near. He sees her shining on a “pearl-white mat,” a bright, pure space, and dressed in a gown of flowers, half real and half the way memory dresses up the people we have lost. The little detail of her hiding her starry eyes above the lattice door (the indikada, the low wooden half-door of a village home) is the shy, almost teasing way a girl might glance out at someone she likes, and it tells you how young and tender this love was.

Then the mood turns. They are wrapped in a cool breeze, but they have walked away from the garden of wildflowers, and that garden is the love they shared, now left behind. He says it twice in a row, that he remembers the way she left him, the way she once was. The repetition is the whole point. He is trying to erase how they loved and cannot, because the more he tells himself to forget, the sharper every picture comes back.

What the listener is left holding is that helpless tenderness of remembering someone you have lost. He is not angry and he is not begging her to return. He is simply sitting with the memory of her smile, knowing it is over, and unable to look away from it.