Samanola Siripa Simba Simba

Kissing and kissing the sacred footprint at Samanala,
lost in a worship heavy with devotion.
Look, son, the sun god
is coming down to the earth.
Waving their little feet,
the small fawns with their soft milk-mouths.
Will you tell me, my son,
of these wonders I cannot see?

On the day my son was born,
I too received eyes I never had.
The rising rays I could not see,
my son saw them for me.
With that sight, that clear awareness,
in the name of kindness and peace,
the little I could not do for my country,
go and carry it out, my son.

This is a devotional song set on the climb to Sri Pada, the sacred peak Sri Lankans call Samanala, where pilgrims bow to the footprint at the summit. A father is making that pilgrimage with his son, and the whole song is him speaking softly to the boy along the way. From the first line you can feel the air of the mountain at dawn: the kissing of the holy footprint, a worship “heavy with devotion,” and the sun rising over the hills.

The tender heart of it is that the father cannot see. When he says “Look, son, the sun god is coming down to the earth,” he is asking the boy to be his eyes. The “sun god descending to the earth” is the dawn breaking over Sri Pada, a sight every pilgrim climbs through the night to witness, and the father can only know it through his son’s words. He asks the boy to describe the little fawns waving their hooves, the wonders he himself can never see. In Sinhala, that image of the small deer with their soft “milk-mouths” carries all the gentle innocence of the world the father is missing.

The second verse turns it around and lands the whole feeling. The father says that on the day his son was born, he gained the eyes he never had: the boy sees the rising sun for him, so in a way the father sees it too. That is the quiet wonder of the song, a sightless man who finds his sight in his child. Out of that gratitude comes the one thing he asks. In the name of kindness and peace, with the clear vision the boy has been given, he asks his son to finish the good work for the country that he, blind and limited, was never able to do himself.

What the listener is left holding is the love between a father and a son on a holy mountain, and a father’s deepest wish: that the child will see what he could not, and do the good he could not. It is devotion to the sacred peak and devotion to a son woven into one, and the second turns out to be just as holy as the first.