Kandukare Lyrics by Dharmarathna Brothers

In the hill country, in the hill country
A love story in the hill country
In the hill country, in the hill country
A love story in the hill country

A young man lived in the village
He set out toward the hills
On a night washed in moonlight
With a longing to go wandering

He broke the loneliness of the hills
Tasting the sweetness of her song from the valley
A sweetness rose up to the hills
The name of the girl who brought it was Nanda

Sweet one, village girl
You who fill the hills with delight
Sweet one, village girl
You who fill the hills with delight

Among the lovely clumps of wild flowers
Going along the hill-country path
Hand in hand, coming down to the valley
Crazy with love, all around

A young man from the village walks up into the hill country one moonlit night, just wanting to roam, and what he finds there is a girl and a love story. That is the whole shape of this song. The word the chorus keeps returning to, kandukare, means the high, misty up-country, the tea-hill region of valleys and ridges, and the song plants its little romance right there in that landscape.

He hears her before he really meets her. The loneliness of the hills is broken by a song drifting up from the valley below, and her voice is so sweet that the sweetness itself seems to climb the slopes to reach him. That image of a sweet sound rising up from the valley to the hilltop is the heart of the song, sound carrying love across the land before the two people have even touched. He gives us her name plainly: Nanda, the village girl whose singing pulled him in.

The names he calls her are all about that sweetness and her simple village roots. Mihiriye means sweet one, gemiliye means village girl, and manahariye means the one who steals your heart or fills it with joy. He is not dazzled by anything grand. He loves that she is of this place, of these hills, singing in the open air.

By the last verse the longing turns into being together. They walk the hill-country path through clumps of wild flowers, then go hand in hand down into the valley, the song says he is umuthuwa, out of his mind, drunk with love, with that feeling spilling out all around them. It is a light, happy love song, a young man wandering into the hills and walking back down with a girl whose voice he could not forget.