Salli Pokuru (Mille Soya) Lyrics by JayaSri

Bunches of money, fistfuls of mille, in our dreams bees dance and hum
For a small country and us small people, let our dreams be granted
We want to lift a pearl umbrella over a rain of happy tears
The strength in our hearts and the effort in our bodies became our only shelter

We came battling through the waves out in the middle of the sea
We came crawling in through the dragon’s mouth of illegal passage
Climbing up to work in the morning, we greet them with “buongiorno!”
Until we clock in and clock out, it’s our sweat that gives off the fragrance

When it’s there, we spread our arms wide, but the fistfuls of mille slip away like the wind
As long as there’s hardship, that’s how our day breaks into light
Where has the moon gone, has it slipped quietly off the road?
We know the moon, uncle, we are not the ones who toppled over

If it were fenced round with thorns, we’d still carry the goods home in our own hands
Coming home like that, this comfort is what gets spent in the village itself
We come and we go again, searching through the mille, here we come
Coming today, coming tomorrow, going here and there and all about
We come and we go again, searching through the mille, here we come
Coming today, coming tomorrow, going here and there and all about

This is one of the best loved songs about Sri Lankans who leave home to work abroad, told in the voice of the men and women who go to Italy and send money back. The title plays on words. “Mille” is the thousand lira note (the money of Italy before the euro), and “salli pokuru” means bunches or clusters of cash, so right away the song is about chasing money in a far country. The cheerful “buongiorno!” they call out at work each morning quietly tells you exactly where they are.

The song opens on the dream that pulls them out of the country in the first place. Bunches of money, fistfuls of mille, and bees humming and dancing in their sleep, that buzzing image is the head full of hope and plans, the sound of imagined wealth. They are small people from a small country asking only that their dreams be granted, and they want to hold up a “pearl umbrella” over a rain of happy tears, the umbrella of shelter and dignity their work is meant to buy for the family back home. All they really have to lean on is the strength in their own hearts and the sweat of their own bodies.

Then the song turns hard and honest, and this is what makes it more than a sad song. They came across the sea fighting the waves and crawled in through “the dragon’s mouth,” the dangerous, often illegal route migrants take to reach Europe. Every morning they climb up to a job and put on a smile and a foreign greeting, and until the workday ends it is their sweat, not perfume, that is their “fragrance.” There is a sharp, knowing humour in those lines. When the money is in hand they open their arms wide, and it slips away like wind just as fast, because the day only ever breaks into light through more hardship. The verse about the moon is the proud heart of the song. The moon, in Sinhala song the image of beauty and of one’s own bright fortune, seems to have wandered off the road and gone missing. “We know the moon, uncle, we are not the ones who fell,” they say, and it is a refusal to be pitied or looked down on. We have not lost ourselves, we have not been broken, even out here.

By the end it settles into the endless rhythm of the migrant life. Even if the path home were fenced with thorns, they would still carry their earnings back with their own hands, and that comfort is spent in the village itself, on the people they left. We come and we go, searching through the mille, today and tomorrow, here and there, with no real stop. What the listener is left holding is both the ache of that constant leaving and a stubborn dignity. These are people doing hard, sometimes humiliating work in a place that is not theirs, and they refuse to be seen as anything less than whole.