Muladi Banda Adarayaka Lyrics by HR Jothipala

If you let go of my hand and give it to another woman as a friend,
my whole life becomes nothing but the drinking of tears.
On the day they bury me down in a grave,
lightning with no rain will strike and split open my grave.

The sweetness of the love we first tied together, even now
I look for that comfort, pressing it tight to my chest.
However much sorrow and grief come over me,
I will not leave and go, my fair-skinned treasure.

Even if you forget me, helpless as I am,
did you really think you could be forgotten by me?
If you ever do that, then one day
all you will meet of me is this dead body of mine.

However much sorrow and grief come over me,
I will not leave and go, my fair-skinned treasure.
The sweetness of the love we first tied together, even now
I look for that comfort, pressing it tight to my chest.

However many flower-maidens there are in the whole forest,
every one of them is beaten by the color of your lips.
If we are never able to come together, my golden one,
let us both find peace in one place, in one single grave.

A young man is speaking to the woman he loves, and what comes out of him is a love that has turned almost frightening in how far it will go. He has heard, or fears, that she might let go of his hand and turn to someone else, and the thought of it doesn’t make him angry so much as it empties him out. If that happens, he says, the rest of his life is just tears, day after day, nothing left to do but cry. This is not a calm, gentle love song. It is the kind of feeling that refuses to imagine a future without her.

The song moves through a few hard images, and each one is the language of someone for whom love and death have collapsed into the same thing. He pictures his own burial, and says that on the day they lay him in the grave, lightning will strike from a dry sky, with no rain behind it, and crack the grave open. In Sinhala, lightning out of a clear sky is the image of something violently wrong, a blow that comes when nothing warns you, so he is saying his death would be that unnatural, that the earth itself would not hold him quietly. Through it all, the one thing he keeps pressing to his chest is the sweetness of the love they first tied together at the start. That phrase, the love they “first tied,” carries the weight of a bond made early and meant to last, and however much grief piles on him, he swears he will never walk away from her. He calls her his “sudu rattaran,” his fair golden treasure, and “ran kanda,” a figure of gold, the warmest names a Sinhala lover reaches for.

Then the song turns, and this is where it goes dark. She may forget him, he allows that, he even calls himself helpless, the one with no power to hold her. But he asks her plainly: did you really think I could ever forget you? And if she does leave him, he gives her a terrible answer. The only part of him she will ever meet again, on some later day, is his dead body. The love that will not let go has decided that if it cannot have her in life, it will wait for her in death.

The last verse softens the cruelty into something almost tender, but no less final. He says that out of all the flower-maidens in the whole forest, every beauty there is, not one can match the color of her lips. She is lovelier than all of them. And so he makes his last wish: if the two of them can never be joined in this life, then let them at least find peace together in one place, in one single grave. That is the ache this song leaves you holding, a love so total it would rather share a grave than live apart, and a man who has made dying beside her sound like the only comfort he has left.