Bindu Bindu Tharaka

Stars, drop by drop, on a lake of tear-flowers
The moon and you lost your minds and laughed that night
Out of a pit of good wishes I hear hymns
Red lotuses bloom in the love I lost
Stars, drop by drop, on a lake of tear-flowers
The moon and you lost your minds and laughed that night

(Alone in the summer heat
a koel cries in the woods)
On the face of the moon a shrine of love is raised
The bee’s song fades, the pollen shakes loose from a flower

Stars, drop by drop, on a lake of tear-flowers
The moon and you lost your minds and laughed that night

(Filling the cup with poisoned wine
you gave it with your own two hands)
Burning down the shrine in my heart, quieting my eyes
Bring a smile to these dying eyes of mine

Stars, drop by drop, on a lake of tear-flowers…

A man is standing under a night sky that has already broken him, and what he sees up there is stars falling one by one into water. The water is a lake of tears, and the tears are flowers. That first image tells you how the rest will go: beauty and grief arriving together, so tangled that he can no longer pull one out of the other.

The moon and the woman he loved laugh together in that night, and the word for their laughing is umathu, out of their minds. In Sinhala song the moon is the standing image of a calm, gentle face, so a moon that has lost its senses warns you straight away that something in this memory is wrong. Then come the good wishes. Somebody has blessed a wedding or a farewell, and to him the blessings sound like hymns rising out of a pit. The red lotuses that open are opening in a love that is no longer his.

The middle verse names the loneliness. A koel calls from the trees in the summer heat, and for a Sri Lankan listener the koel belongs to April, to Avurudu, to families coming home. Here it just cries, alone. On the face of the moon he raises a seya, a stupa, the domed shrine built over the remains of the dead. He has buried the love and set its monument in the sky where he has to keep looking at it. Around it the bee’s song thins out and pollen shakes loose from a flower, the sweetness leaving something that was full of it a moment ago.

The last verse turns to her. She fills the cup with poisoned wine and holds it out in both palms, the way an offering is given, and he takes it. It burns down the shrine in his chest and puts his eyes to rest, and the only thing he asks for is small and terrible: while it kills him, let her put a smile on his face. There is no pleading in that line. He accepts. That is what makes the song so hard to shake off, a man taking the last thing she hands him and still calling it love.