Unmada Sithuwam Lyrics by Gunadasa Kapuge

Frenzied paintings drawn on a cracked wall,
in the mist, in the clouds, in the faded past.
A heart set on fire by a love that broke apart,
grown lonely, all alone.

In the endless sky, on the fearful ocean of this life,
only a desolate, solitary wind is what I have been given.
On a mind where the moon keeps falling, forever wandering,
grown lonely, all alone.

Of a thousand flowers, I longed for just one,
yet that flower mocked me and slipped away and hid.
Even now I can feel the faint scent of that flower,
grown lonely, all alone.

This is a quiet, aching song about a man left alone after a love has broken, and about how heavy that loneliness sits on a whole life. The voice belongs to someone looking back, the words turning over and over in his mind like images he cannot stop seeing. He opens by calling his own thoughts “frenzied paintings drawn on a cracked wall.” It is a striking picture: his memories are not framed and clean, they are scrawled on something already broken, half lost in mist and faded into the past. From the first line you understand that the love is over and what is left is only the wreckage of remembering it.

The second verse widens out from one broken heart to the size of a whole existence. He sees life as an “endless sky” and a “fearful ocean,” vast and frightening, and in all of that, the only thing he has been handed is “a desolate, solitary wind.” In Sinhala song the lonely wind is the standing image for a life with no one in it, a sound that moves through empty space and touches nothing. Then he says his mind is a place “where the moon keeps falling.” The moon in our songs is usually the beloved’s face, calm and beautiful, so a moon that keeps falling, again and again, is the memory of her that will not stay risen, will not stay steady. His thoughts go on wandering with it, never able to rest.

The last verse holds the real heart of the song. Out of a thousand flowers, he says, he wanted only one. That one flower is the one person he loved, and he wanted nothing else in the world. But the flower “mocked him and hid,” she turned away and was gone, and the gentleness of the flower image only makes the rejection sting more. The line that lingers is the last one: even now, after everything, he can still catch her faint fragrance. That is how love stays. The person is gone, the flower has hidden itself, and yet the scent of her remains in him, just enough to keep the loneliness alive. The song ends where it keeps returning, on a man grown lonely, all alone, carrying a sweetness he can no longer reach.