Ahasa Usata Nega Giyata Lyrics by Gunadasa Kapuge

Even though we climb high up into the sky,
we never get to stay there in the sky.
Even though we raise mansions in the sky,
we ourselves remain down on the ground.

On the hanging scaffold our arms reach out,
and we climb up along the walls.
And as the wall rises higher and higher,
we look smaller and smaller from below.

Mixing the cement with our tears for water,
we build seven storeys high.
The scaffolding creaks and creaks,
shaped, all of it, out of our suffering.

This is one of Gunadasa Kapuge’s songs of social conscience, sung in the voice of the construction workers who put up the tall buildings of the city. There is no romance here and no single hero. It speaks for the men on the scaffolding, the laborers whose hands raise the towers that other people will live and work in.

The whole song turns on one quiet, bitter contrast. The workers climb high into the sky all day, yet none of that sky is theirs. They build mansions up in the air, but when the work is done they come back down and stand where they always stood, on the bare ground. “We raise mansions in the sky, we remain on the ground” is the heart of it, the people who build the grand buildings will never own one or live in one. The higher the wall rises, the smaller they look to anyone watching from the street below, and that shrinking is not only about distance. It is about how little the men who do the work are seen, how easily a person becomes a tiny figure against a wall he built with his own hands.

The strongest image comes in the last verse. To make cement you mix the dry powder with water, but here the worker says the water is his tears, “mixing the cement with our tears.” It is a way of saying the building is literally made of their hardship, that their sweat and grief are poured into every floor. So when the scaffolding creaks under their feet, that creaking sound is the sound of their own suffering, the seven storeys standing up on the backs of the poor.

What the listener is left with is a plain, hard truth dressed in a simple picture. The people who build the city out of cement and labor get none of its comfort. Kapuge gives those unseen hands a voice, and the song asks you, gently, to look up at the next tall building and remember whose tears went into it.