Aththamma Niwan Gihin Lyrics by Harshana Disanayake

(Grandmother has passed on to nibbana,
now she’s so far from us.
For many days we kept watching for her,
but it looks like she’s never coming back.
Even so, the verses she taught me,
the lines and refrains of her folk songs,
in grandmother’s very own rhythm,
I still know them by heart…//)

Herding the milk cows together,
feeding them their fill,
driving them in and gathering them up,
we tilled our paddy field.
They say it’s because of grandmother’s verses
that all of us sing the old songs,
they say it’s the sweetness of grandmother’s verses
that we are still savouring today.

Grandmother has passed on to nibbana….

“The heron’s out in the field, the curry’s on the hearth,
in the green paddy, the pittu is steaming on the fire.”
“What’s that in your mouth, son?”
“Why, uncle, it’s a lump of jaggery.”
They say it’s because of grandmother’s verses
that all of us sing the old songs,
they say it’s the sweetness of grandmother’s verses
that we are still savouring today.

Grandmother has passed on to nibbana….

This is a song of remembrance for a grandmother who has died. In Sinhala you say someone has “gone to nibbana” the way English speakers say someone has gone to rest, and that gentle phrase is how the song opens. The grandchild kept watching the road for her for days, the way children do, half expecting her to walk back in, before the truth settles that she is gone for good. The aththamma here is the village grandmother, the one who raised the children while their parents worked, and what she left behind is not money or land but her voice.

What she handed down was kavi, the old Sinhala folk verses. These were never written in books. They were sung out loud while herding the cattle, working the paddy field, or sitting by the hearth, passed mouth to mouth down the generations. The song says all of this plainly: the grandchildren sing because she sang, and the very taste of her verses is something they are still enjoying. In Sinhala, to “savour” a verse (rasa vindinawa) means to feel its flavour, the small joke or beauty tucked inside it, the way you’d savour good food.

The third stanza is the proof of it. Instead of describing the verses, the song just gives you one, in the old call-and-response style. A heron stands in the field, a pot of curry sits on the fire, pittu steams away in the middle of the green paddy, and then two voices trade a teasing little riddle: what’s in your mouth, son? A lump of jaggery, uncle. It is a small village scene, half nonsense, half affection, exactly the kind of rhyme a grandmother would chant to make a child laugh. By singing it back, the grandchild keeps her alive.

That is the quiet ache underneath the song. She is gone, and yet every time the family opens their mouths to sing one of her verses, she is there in the rhythm. The grief is real, but the song lands somewhere softer than grief, on the comfort that the people we lose stay with us in the small things they taught us to say.