Obata Ma Adaraya Kala Bawa Lyrics by Malani Bulathsinhala

How much I loved you, I never truly knew,
not until you left me and went away to a distant land.

You disappeared behind a cloud in the empty sky,
the row of bright, smiling lamps blew out in the harsh wind.

How much I loved you, I never truly knew,
not until you left me and went away to a distant land.

The sun has died, the full moon has died, the world is in darkness,
how am I to lie here on the sleeping mat in this lonely hut?

How much I loved you, I never truly knew,
not until you left me and went away to a distant land.

A woman is left alone after the person she loved has gone away to a far country, and only now, in the silence he left behind, does she realize how deeply she loved him. That is the ache the whole song turns on. She didn’t measure her love while he was near. It was the leaving that made it plain, and by then it was too late to say so.

The song moves from that quiet admission into images of a world that has gone dark. She says he vanished behind a cloud in the empty sky, the way the moon slips out of sight and leaves the night without its light. Then the row of smiling lamps blew out in a fierce wind. In Sinhala a “pahan veta”, a line of small oil lamps, is the warmth and happiness of a home, the glow you light for festivals and for company, so when the wind snuffs them all out it means the joy of her life has been blown away in one cruel gust. His leaving wasn’t gentle. It came like a sudden storm.

The last verse pushes the darkness as far as it will go. The sun has died, the full moon has died, the whole world is in shadow. For her there is no longer any light by day or by night, no comfort anywhere. And then the picture narrows down to something small and very real, the lonely hut and the empty sleeping mat where she now has to lie down alone. After all the talk of sky and sun and moon, the song ends on that bare mat in a quiet house, which is where the loss actually lives.

What stays with you is that mix of regret and emptiness. She isn’t only grieving that he is gone. She is grieving that she understood her own heart too late, and now she carries that knowledge through a house and a world that have lost all their light.