Amma Kiyala Baha Thorana Lyrics by Jude Rogans

From the time I learned to shape the word “Amma,” to say “mother,”
I could never do without it.
Even the breath I draw became a lullaby.
Did I forget you, mother, the day I fell in love?
The day I fell in love…

From the time I learned to shape the word “mother,”
I could never do without it…

You loved me down to the last warm breath of me,
bearing a child’s troubles, a weight as great as Mount Meru.
I cannot stay forever in the shelter of your eyes,
there is someone else now, waiting for me.
Take pity and grant your son your pardon,
through all of sasara (the cycle of rebirth) I will never turn from my mother.
Mother, I have never met anyone like you,
no, never met anyone like you…

From the time I learned to shape the word “mother,”
I could never do without it…

I am the one asking this of my own heart,
no one has ever stood equal to you.
Through every life of sasara this is my one wish,
that in every birth you come to me again as my mother.
Take pity and grant your son your pardon,
through all of sasara I will never turn from my mother.
Mother, I have never met anyone like you,
no, never met anyone like you…

“Amma,” I say…
From the time I learned to shape the word “mother,”
I could never do without it…

A grown son is speaking to his mother, and the whole song is built around the very first word he ever learned to say, “Amma.” He remembers how, from the moment his small mouth could shape it, he could never go a day without the word, and how even his breathing felt like a lullaby she had once hummed over him. That tender opening sets up the ache underneath the song, because he is no longer a small boy. He has grown up, he has fallen in love, and a part of him feels guilty about it, as if loving someone new means he has somehow left his mother behind.

The middle of the song is where that worry comes out plainly. He tells her she loved every last bit of him, “down to the warm breath,” and that she carried the hardships of raising him like a weight as heavy as Mount Meru. Mount Meru (Mahamera) is the great mythic mountain at the center of the world in Buddhist and Hindu cosmology, so to say her burden was “as great as Meru” is to say it was almost beyond measuring. Then comes the gentle, painful truth: he cannot stay forever wrapped in the shelter of her eyes, because there is now someone else waiting for him, a partner, a life of his own. So he asks her to take pity and forgive him, the way a child asks a parent for pardon.

What lifts the song out of simple guilt is the promise he makes through sasara, the long cycle of birth and rebirth in Sri Lankan Buddhist belief. He swears he will never turn away from her across all of those lives, and his one wish, life after life, is that she be born to him again as his mother. In Sinhala devotion this is the deepest vow you can make to someone, not just love for this lifetime but love stretched across every future birth.

By the end he says it as plainly as a person can: he has never met anyone like her, and no one will ever stand in her place. The song leaves you with the quiet weight every grown child carries, the love for a mother that does not shrink when a new love arrives, and the longing to tell her so before it is too late.