Mata Sithanna Ba Lyrics by Iraj Weeraratne

I can’t think, I can’t take this in
I don’t even have the heart to think about it
The spark of love bloomed on my chest like a lotus
I can’t let it wither away

The love-messenger who gave her love with all her life
left me, her eyes telling me, showing only sorrow
Do not grow proud, palace of my heart
Is the mountain of dreams beautiful, my beloved

No… it just can’t be, not in any way

I don’t know anything anymore
If this is how it is, it can’t be true

A young man has just been hit with news he cannot make himself believe, and the song is that first stunned moment when the mind refuses to accept what the heart already knows. He keeps saying he can’t think, can’t even bring himself to think, because the love he was holding has slipped away. There is no anger here at the start, only a kind of numb disbelief.

The image at the centre of the first verse is the most tender part of the song. He says love bloomed on his chest like a lotus, a siyapatha, the water lily that opens slowly and clean above the mud. In Sinhala song the lotus stands for something pure and quietly sacred, so by reaching for it he is saying this love was the gentlest, most beautiful thing that ever grew in him. And now he is begging that it not be allowed to wither, the way a cut flower fades. He is pleading with fate not to let something so pure die on him.

In the second verse he remembers her as the one who gave her love with her whole life, a prema duthika, a messenger of love, and then walked away with sorrow in her eyes. He turns inward and talks to his own heart, calling it a palace, herde maliga, and warning it not to be proud, as if his own hope had built a grand home for this love and now that home stands empty. When he asks whether the mountain of dreams is still beautiful, he is asking the painful question quietly: were all those dreams we built together ever real, or just something I climbed alone.

By the end the words break down into almost nothing, just “no, it can’t be” and “I don’t know anything anymore.” That is the truest thing in the song. When a love you trusted with your whole self falls apart, you are left with no clever words, only the simple refusal to believe it, repeated until it finally sinks in. The song leaves him there, in that raw space between losing her and admitting she is gone.