Gana Anda Karayen Midi Lyrics by HR Jothipala

He he….
Ha ha hmm hmmmm
Ha ha ha….

Ho ho ho…
He he….

Hm mmm…

Freed from the thick darkness,
through eyes that do not know the world,
the jewelled palace I built has crumbled,
and from my heart tears of blood flow down.

Star of the sky, this night the stars are your friends,
but for me the whole world is dark and barren.

Star of the sky, this night the stars are your friends,
but for me the whole world is dark and barren.

To these eyes you appear, yet you stay unseen, you cannot hide from me.

Right before me my sight grew tangled and lost.
Why did life turn out not to be what I longed for?
If the butterfly does not come to the flower for its fragrance,
then the flower itself must fly to him.
What you said in your tender youth, now it has all broken apart, and now you are mine.

The golden home of my heart,
there is no sweetness left in it, I know it now.
The jewelled palace I built has crumbled,
and from my heart tears of blood flow down.
Ha ha… …..
Ho ho ho……
He he he …..
Hmm hm mmm….

A man who has gone blind sings here about the world closing in on him and the love he has lost along with his sight. He has been “freed from thick darkness” only in the bitter sense that darkness is now all he has. His eyes are open but they no longer know the world, and what pours out of him is not ordinary grief but “tears of blood,” the Sinhala way of saying a pain too deep for normal weeping.

The picture he keeps returning to is a “jewelled palace” that has crumbled. That palace is the life and the love he once built for himself, bright and precious, a future he thought was solid. Now it lies in pieces. When he calls out to the “star of the sky” and says the stars are her friends tonight while his whole world is dark, he is drawing the cruelest line he can: she still has light, company, a sky full of stars, and he has only blackness. The night that others find beautiful is, for him, just the permanent state of his eyes.

The heart of the song is in the image of the butterfly and the flower. In Sinhala love poetry the butterfly comes to the flower drawn by its fragrance, the natural way longing finds its object. Here he turns it around: if the butterfly will not come to the flower, then the flower must fly to him. He is the flower now, unable to chase, unable even to see, so love would have to come and find him where he sits in the dark. It is a quiet, aching reversal of the usual order of things.

By the end he is sure of his loss. The “golden home of his heart” holds no sweetness anymore, and the promises she made in her tender youth have all broken apart. There is a hollow turn in “now you are mine,” because whatever he has of her now is only memory and ruin, not the living love he wanted. What the listener is left holding is the loneliness of a man for whom the lights have gone out in every sense, still reaching for a beauty he can feel but can no longer see.