Sulanga Numba Wagei

You are like the wind
that moves around the flowers of my heart
quietly stealing their scent away
and getting ready to leave
You are like the rain
falling on my heart’s flower today
That the colour of that flower
never runs is the real wonder

It was you who shaped this heart of mine
coming after me, following and following
and it was you who gave me comfort
So you walking off with my heart
is no wonder at all

It was you who left this heart alone
You searched out the tender places in my heart
and it was you who hurt me too
Yet my heart cannot get free of you
and that is the real wonder

A man is still talking to a woman who has already gone, and he cannot decide whether to blame her or thank her. Every verse circles back to one word, pudumayak, a wonder, a strange thing. Some of what she did surprises him and some of it does not surprise him at all, and working out which is which is the whole song.

He begins with the wind. In Sinhala song the heart is often a garden, and his feelings here are sith mal, the flowers of the heart. Wind passes through a garden without breaking a single stem, carries the scent off with it and is gone, which is exactly how she moved through him. Then he switches to rain. Rain in a love song is usually the thing that soaks you and washes the colour out, so when he says the rain fell on his flower and the colour still did not run, he is telling her that whatever she did, the feeling held.

The middle verse is where he gives her everything. She is the one who made this heart what it is, she is the one who kept coming after him, she is the one who settled him when he needed it. So her leaving with his heart is, in his words, no wonder at all. It was hers before she took it.

The last verse turns the same closeness against him. Someone who knows a person that well also knows where the soft places are, and she went looking for them. The loneliness came from her, the hurt came from her, and still he says his heart cannot come loose. He does not ask for pity or curse her for any of it. He just holds up the strange fact of it, that the one who did the damage is the one he cannot put down, and calls that the real wonder.