Mathakaya Asurin (Amma) Lyrics by Indrani Perera

Gathering up my memories, trying to hold you in my mind,
I’ve worn myself out again, again and again, and for what.
Why was I left without that blessing, I cried without stopping.
Mother, mother, why do I keep searching for someone who isn’t here?
There is no clear picture, only a shadow,
and I know that shadow is you.

On some morning long ago, you
must have rocked me to sleep, soothed me when I cried.
Seeing my hurt, you must have given me your milk.
Stroking my head, smoothing my little body,
you must have kissed my face, and when you had to go from me,
you must have wished you could stay, and then had to let it go.
Mother, mother, why do I keep searching for someone who isn’t here?
There is no clear picture, only a shadow,
and I know that shadow is you.

This is a song from a grown child to a mother who was lost so early that there is almost nothing left to remember her by. The whole thing is the ache of trying to picture a face you never really got to see. There was no time to store up memories, so all that remains is a feeling, and the singer keeps reaching for it anyway.

The first part is exhausted and almost helpless. The child has tried so hard to call up a memory and come away with nothing, just tears and the same unanswered question: why am I searching for someone who isn’t here. The most quietly devastating line is the one about the shadow. There is no clear picture, only a faint outline, a “chaya,” and the child decides that blurry shape must be the mother. That is all there is, and the child holds onto it because it is better than nothing.

Then the song does something tender. Since there are no real memories, the child imagines what surely happened. You must have rocked me to sleep. You must have hushed me when I cried. You must have fed me, stroked my head, kissed my face. In Sinhala, “le kiri” (your blood turned to milk) is the everyday image for a mother nursing her baby, the body itself becoming food and care, and it carries the whole weight of a mother’s sacrifice in two words. None of this is remembered. It is all “athi,” it must have been so, the child filling the empty space with the ordinary, loving things every mother does.

The hardest turn is the last imagining: when you had to go from me, you must have wished you could stay, and then had to let go. That single line tells you the mother died, and that even in dying she did not want to leave her child. The song ends back at the shadow, the only thing the child has, now made warmer by everything the child has chosen to believe was true. It leaves you with the strange grief of mourning someone you cannot even remember, and loving them completely all the same.