La Signore Mottu Lyrics by Lahiru Perera

I grew up in Matale, that’s my patch
A skinny one who picked up a bag from the paddy field
That girl went and ditched me
One day I’ll bring the little miss down a peg
Siripala the matchmaker had a swelling come up
Cast a spell on the swelling, off it goes, run, boys
The swelling turned to tea, and for that I went broke
Hey, now I’m rolling on the ground, flat penniless

Let the slander spread, let the world see it
They take the messed-up me and chop me into bytes
Head spinning, I run this way and that
I’m sleeping in an Egyptian pyramid

The two of them are crying tears of joy
What’s left for me is this dog’s tail
We get along just fine, bent over like paddy stalks
One day I’ll show them, Rambo part two
Back in the day we ate our chicken in pieces
The spine that used to be straight has gone crooked
Eating three meals a day, all of it on the tab

So now then

Just stand there, what you’ll be swallowing is pittu

This is a comic rap, all swagger and self-mockery, the kind of track Lahiru Perera built a name on. There is no broken heart to take seriously here. The fun is in the slang, the rhymes that fall on the same sound at the end of every line (thattu, kettu, wettu, mattu), and a narrator who keeps bragging and then undercutting himself in the very next breath. He claims Matale as his turf, talks himself up as a tough guy, and then admits a girl dumped him and left him penniless on the floor. That swing between boasting and falling flat is the whole joke.

A lot of the humour rides on local images an outsider would miss. A “kapuwa” like the Siripala he names is the village marriage broker, the man who arranges matches, so dragging him in is a dig at the whole business of being set up and married off. “Mottu” (a bud or a swelling) gets played with across several lines until it turns into tea and then into him going broke, a chain of nonsense puns that exists just for the rhyme and the laugh. “Eating chicken in pieces” and “putting three meals a day on the tab” (seettu, the shop credit chit) paint the broke, scraping-by life with a grin rather than a complaint. “Bent like paddy stalks” is the picture of stooped, beaten-down people still claiming they get along fine, and “Rambo part two” is the empty threat of a man promising he will come back and show everyone, while clearly in no state to.

The last line is the punchline the whole thing has been building toward. “Hitagena gilinnai wenne pittu,” just stand there and what you’ll end up swallowing is pittu, the steamed rice-and-coconut cake. It is a cheeky Sinhala way of saying you’ll be left with nothing, or you’ll have to eat your words, choke it down and like it. After all the strutting about turf and revenge and going to war, the narrator lands on the most ordinary, deflating image possible, a mouthful of plain pittu.

What you are left holding is not feeling so much as a laugh. The song is a wink at the broke, dumped, big-talking everyman, dressed up in street slang and food jokes, and it never once asks you to feel sorry for him. That is exactly why it works.