Samanala Ranak Se Igili Lyrics by Marians

Flying off like a flock of butterflies, those school days when we went to learn our letters
If only that beautiful time could come back again, our hearts long for it //

Sheltered in the embrace of our mother school
matching “a” to “aa,” fitting the letters together….//
Without us even noticing, twelve years slipped by
and the school days came to an end //

Running, jumping, dancing, racing each other
winning and laughing through those days //
Winning the hearts of our teachers and our parents
the days we spent in the embrace of our school
Like a lamp flame caught by the wind
did our childhood quietly hide itself away?

Flying off like a flock of butterflies…..

This is a song about growing up and looking back at school, the kind of memory almost everyone in Sri Lanka carries. The voice belongs to someone now older, remembering the years from the first day of learning the alphabet right up to leaving school for good, and wishing those days could come back.

The opening image sets the whole mood. School children are “a flock of butterflies,” bright, restless, scattering in every direction, and now they have flown off into adult life. Twelve years of school is the full stretch from grade one to the end of A-Levels in Sri Lanka, and the song marvels that all of it passed without anyone noticing. One day you are sounding out “a” and “aa,” the first letters of the Sinhala alphabet, and the next it is simply over.

The phrase that keeps returning is “mother school,” paasal maw. In Sri Lanka the school is spoken of like a parent, a second mother who raises and shelters you, so the singer pictures himself tucked into her arms the way a child curls into his mother. The middle of the song is just plain, happy memory: running and playing, winning races, making teachers and parents proud, the easy joy of being young with nothing to weigh you down.

Then comes the line that gives the song its ache. Childhood, it says, vanished “like a lamp flame caught by the wind.” A small oil lamp flame is steady and gentle until a gust snuffs it out in an instant, and that is exactly how those years feel from the far side: warm, glowing, and gone before you could cup your hands around them. The song does not really ask for school back so much as for that lost lightness, and anyone who has left their own classrooms behind will feel the pull of it.