Re Wedamura

The night shift ends,
and in the morning mother comes home,
I leave for school early,
and by the time I get back from school,
mother is off again to the night shift

Father comes home in the dead of night,
and in the morning goes off again,
to eat rice from my mother’s hand,
to sit on my father’s lap,
the merit I have earned falls short

On Sundays both of them are home,
but for me there are always extra classes,
that night there is a party,
with teasing and loud showing-off,
and I am forbidden to go near it

A quietly heartbreaking song told entirely in a child’s voice, about parents who are never home because they are always working. The whole first verse is a treadmill: mother’s night shift ends just as the child leaves for school in the morning, and by the time school lets out, she is already heading off to the night shift again. Their lives pass each other like changing shifts, never overlapping.

The second verse adds the father, who comes home in the dead of night and is gone again by morning. Then the child says the saddest thing in the song, in the gentlest Buddhist terms: to eat rice from my mother’s hand, to sit on my father’s lap, the merit I have earned falls short. A small child explains their own loneliness as a shortage of good karma, as if being held by a parent were a blessing they simply had not earned.

The last verse closes the trap. Sundays, when both parents are finally home, are eaten up by the child’s own extra classes; and when there is a party nearby, full of teasing and noisy fun, the child is forbidden to go near it. It is a tender, socially aware song about the children of overworked parents, love that everyone feels but no one has the time to give, seen through the plain, uncomplaining eyes of the child left waiting. Sung by Harshana Disanayake, written and composed by Shantha Jayalath Thisera.