Oba Ma Hamu Una Lyrics by Karunarathna Diwulgane

You and I met beneath this very heart of May
Wherever you may be, on the day I die
come and be with me in my loneliness…
come and be with me in my loneliness…

From the day your heart and mine first met
the flower of love I offered with my life has withered now…//
holding me close in your thoughts, on the day I die
come and be with me in my loneliness…
come and be with me in my loneliness…

Without shedding a tear or a sigh, the two of us,
the way we once walked together toward that mirage of a sea…//
carrying me in your heart, on the day I die
come and be with me in my loneliness…
come and be with me in my loneliness…

A man is speaking to the woman he once loved, and he is asking her for one last thing. Wherever she is now, whatever has come between them, he wants her beside him on the day he dies, so that he does not have to face that final loneliness alone. That quiet plea, “come and be with me,” runs through the whole song like a heartbeat.

He goes back to the beginning, to the month of May when they first met and to the day their hearts first found each other. Out of that beginning he gave her a flower of love, but he gave it with his very life, and now that flower has withered. In Sinhala song a flower offered in love standing for the love itself is a familiar image, and a withered flower says the love is spent, the bloom gone, even though the feeling under it has not died. He is not bitter about it. He just wants her to remember and to come.

The deepest line is the one about the mirage sea. He recalls how the two of them once walked together toward a “mirigu sayura,” a mirage ocean, the shimmering water you think you see on a hot road that vanishes as you reach it. That is what their love turned out to be, something beautiful they walked toward side by side, believing it was real, only to find there was no water there at all. And the ache of it is that they walked toward it without a single tear or sigh, hopeful, not knowing it would dissolve.

What the listener is left holding is something gentle and sad at once. There is no anger in him, only a tired tenderness and a wish that whatever they had, real or a mirage, she will hold him in her heart long enough to stand by him at the end. It is a love that asks for nothing now except not to be forgotten when it matters most.