Himaleta Wada Usai Lyrics by Jude Rogans

Higher than the Himalayas is the love in your chest,
but your sternness when I did wrong was more bitter than kasaya (a bitter herbal brew).
You spoke of the society out there, always watching with sharp eyes,
and you told me, over and over, become a good man.
My beloved father,
my beloved father,
my beloved father,
my beloved father.

Higher than the Himalayas is the love in your chest,
but your sternness when I did wrong was more bitter than kasaya.

On the days my stubborn heart wandered off the path,
how many tears must have filled those eyes of yours.
You never gave up on me, you only took the words you gave me and set me on the right road,
and seeing where I stand today, you give your advice with joy.
You told me, over and over, become a good man.
Even in the saṃsāra (rebirths) to come, it is you I wish for, father.

Higher than the Himalayas is the love in your chest,
but your sternness when I did wrong was more bitter than kasaya.

When trouble came to me you sat beside me without fear,
and seeing me rise in life you give me your blessing.
I have worshipped gods I cannot see, but it was you who turned out to be my god.
In every birth I am born into, let me be your son.
You told me, over and over, become a good man.
Even in the saṃsāra to come, it is you I wish for, father.

Higher than the Himalayas is the love in your chest,
but your sternness when I did wrong was more bitter than kasaya.
You spoke of the society out there, always watching with sharp eyes,
and you told me, over and over, become a good man.
My beloved father,
my beloved father,
my beloved father,
my beloved father.

Higher than the Himalayas is the love in your chest,
but your sternness when I did wrong was more bitter than kasaya.

This is a son’s tribute to his father, sung with all the gratitude that usually only comes once you are grown and can finally see what a parent did for you. The voice is a man looking back on his childhood and his harder years, talking to his father directly, half in thanks and half in love that he never quite found the words for until now.

He measures his father’s love against the biggest thing he can think of, and even the Himalayas come up short. In the same breath he admits the other side of that love, the sternness. He compares it to kasaya, the bitter herbal medicine Sri Lankan families brew when someone is unwell. Nobody enjoys drinking it, but it is given because it heals you. That is exactly how he now understands his father’s strictness: it tasted bitter when he was being scolded for doing wrong, but it was medicine, meant to make him well. The other thing his father kept warning him about was “the society out there with its sharp watching eyes,” the very Sri Lankan idea that people are always observing how you behave, and the line his father repeated like a refrain was simple, “become a good man.”

The middle of the song is the son owning up. There were days his stubborn heart wandered off the path, and he can only now imagine how many tears those wanderings put in his father’s eyes. What moves him most is that his father never threw him away for it. He just kept setting him back on the right road, and now, seeing where his son has ended up, he gives his advice happily instead of in anger. The wish that follows is the deepest thing a Sri Lankan can say to someone they love: he prays that even in saṃsāra, the long cycle of births and rebirths to come, he gets this same man as his father again.

By the last verse the gratitude turns to something close to worship. His father stood beside him without fear when trouble came, and blesses him now that he is doing well. Then comes the line the whole song was building toward: he has bowed to gods he has never seen, but the god who was actually there, visible and real, was his father all along. So he asks for the only thing that matters to him, to be born as this man’s son in every life he is given. It is a quiet, aching kind of love, the kind we tend to feel for our parents only after we are old enough to understand the cost of what they gave us.