Aravinda Yaya Lyrics by K Sujeewa

Tarap thara rirap thara
Tharap thara ro
Tarap thara rirap thara
Tharap thara ro

The lotus field, a fine drizzle, a soft breeze
It turns over in my heart, it grows inside me, this blessed youth
The song that sinks into the heart, the sweet fragrance of life
This simple, gentle love, this blessed youth

Tender shoots breaking out of the earth, aren’t they?
Did the heart give away its precious life, did the moonlight fade?

In the dark of night, the breath of life, a single dewdrop, the breeze
The sweet smile slipping in secretly, into the dream I longed for in sleep
The song that sinks into the heart, the sweet fragrance of life
This simple, gentle love, this blessed youth

Tender shoots breaking out of the earth, aren’t they?
Did the heart give away its precious life, did the moonlight fade?

The lotus field, a fine drizzle, a soft breeze
It turns over in my heart, it grows inside me, this blessed youth
In the dark of night, the breath of life, a single dewdrop, the breeze
The sweet smile slipping in secretly, into the dream I longed for in sleep
The song that sinks into the heart, the sweet fragrance of life
This simple, gentle love, this blessed youth

Tender shoots breaking out of the earth, aren’t they?
Did the heart give away its precious life, did the moonlight fade?

Can love grow out of this difference?
If there is the hatred of a cobra between us, what good is love?

A young man is in the first rush of love, and the whole song is him trying to put words to a feeling that keeps stirring inside him. He opens not with a sentence but with a hum, “tarap thara rirap thara,” the kind of wordless melody you sing under your breath when you are happy and a little lost in it. That hum sets the mood before any meaning does. This is youth itself singing.

The pictures he reaches for are all soft and growing things. He sees a field of lotus (aravinda yaya), a fine drizzle, a gentle breeze, and then says the same feeling “turns over” in his heart and grows inside him. In Sinhala song the lotus and the new sprout stand for purity and for something freshly opening, so when he asks about the “tender shoots breaking out of the earth,” he is really talking about love itself pushing up new and unstoppable, the way young plants come through soil after rain. He keeps calling it bhadra yawwana, this blessed or auspicious youth, the idea that being young and in love is a kind of grace, a season that will not come again. The love he describes is sarala and sugama, simple and easy, nothing complicated, just sweet.

Then the imagery turns tender and a little aching. He speaks of the dark of night, a single dewdrop, the breath of life, and a sweet smile that slips in “secretly” into the dream he was hoping for. This is the part every young person knows, lying awake at night, the face of the one you love arriving uninvited in your half sleep. When he asks whether the heart gave away its precious life and whether the moonlight faded, he is using the moon the way Sinhala lyric always does, as the image of a calm and lovely face. He is asking, half afraid, whether this feeling will cost him something, whether the light he is staring at might dim.

The last two lines pull the whole thing into sharper focus and give the song its real weight. He asks whether love can ever grow across “this difference,” and then says, plainly, that if there is the hatred of a cobra between two people, love is useless. The cobra (naya) carries the sense of a deep, poisonous enmity, the kind families or castes or old grudges can hold. So under all the lotus fields and moonlight, this is a young man asking the oldest question of love in this part of the world, can two hearts really come together when the world around them is set against it. The sweetness of the earlier verses and that worried final question are what make the song land. It is young love that is beautiful precisely because it is not sure it will be allowed.