Hemata Wada Lyrics by Milinda Sandaruwan

Though I loved you more than anyone, all those days ago,
I lost your hands because I was poor.
Even with all my hardships, I never let you go short of anything.
And knowing that full well, what you have done to me today is too cruel.

Even when others said back then that there was no one as worthy as you,
I still can’t believe it now, that those words came from you yourself.
I lost your hands because I was poor.
Even with all my hardships, I never let you go short of anything.
And knowing that full well, what you have done to me today is too cruel.

Until we meet again in saṃsāra (the cycle of rebirth), bound by this same familiar love,
wherever you go, stay happy always, even more than when you were here beside me.
I lost your hands because I was poor.
Even with all my hardships, I never let you go short of anything.
And knowing that full well, what you have done to me today is too cruel.

More than anyone, you…

A young man is speaking to the woman he loved and lost, and the wound is still fresh. He loved her more than anyone, but in the end he could not hold on to her, and he knows exactly why. She left him because he was poor. That is the ache running under every line, the quiet shame of a man who had nothing but his love to offer and watched it not be enough.

What makes it hurt is that he never let her feel his poverty. He says it plainly: he had every hardship, but he never let her go without. He carried the lack himself so she would not have to. So when she walks away knowing all of this, it lands as a betrayal, not just a loss. “Knowing that full well, what you have done to me today is too cruel,” he says, and you can hear that he is more stunned than angry. He even struggles to believe the words came from her own mouth, the same person others once called the most worthy of all.

The turn comes in the last verse, and it is the most Sri Lankan thing in the song. Instead of cursing her, he reaches for saṃsāra, the Buddhist cycle of birth and rebirth. He hopes that somewhere in a future life they will meet again, drawn back by this same love, “purudu pemin,” the love grown familiar. And until then he wishes her happiness wherever she goes, even more happiness than she had beside him. In Sinhala love songs this is the highest form of letting go, releasing someone with a blessing instead of bitterness, trusting the long arc of rebirth to bring back what this life took away.

That is what the listener is left holding. Not revenge, not pleading, but a poor man’s dignity. He has lost her hands, but he keeps the one thing she could not take, the largeness of how he loved her.