Awasara Natha Mata Lyrics by Milton Mallawarachchi

I have no leave to take your hand in mine
bound as I am by ties across the four corners of a far-off world
and yet, in every life I am born into from here on
I will make you mine at last, my dear

Unable to become a bee, I am left aching
for to me you are no lotus to be reached
unable to become a spring, I am left aching
for to me you are no ocean to flow into

I have no leave to take your hand in mine
bound as I am by ties across the four corners of a far-off world

It is not that there is no room in my heart
to call you to me, to give you rest in your world of dreams
it is only that I cannot bear to wound him
I cannot bear to make him weep

I have no leave….

A man is speaking to the woman he loves, and the first thing he tells her is the saddest thing of all: he has no right to take her hand. She is already bound to someone else, promised and tied by the obligations of life, and he knows it. So he does not ask her to leave that life. Instead he makes the only vow left to him. In every birth he is given from now on, through every turn of saṃsāra (the cycle of rebirth), he will find her again and finally make her his. It is a Buddhist idea of love that runs all through Sinhala song, where what cannot happen in this life is carried forward into the next, and the next.

The middle of the song is where the ache really lives, and it works through two beautiful images. He says he could not become a bee, so the lotus is not his to reach. He could not become a spring, so the ocean is not his to flow into. In Sinhala poetry the bee and the lotus, the stream and the sea, are the classic pairing of two things made for each other, drawn together by nature itself. By saying he failed to become the bee or the spring, he is saying the fault is his, that he simply was not the one fate arranged to meet her. She is the lotus and the ocean, perfect and waiting, but not for him. There is no blame in it, only a quiet sorrow that he was born into the wrong place in the order of things.

Then he answers the question she must be wondering. It is not that he lacks the room to love her. There is space in his heart to call her close and to let her rest there, and there is room in his dreams to keep her. What stops him is gentler and harder than that. He cannot bring himself to hurt the other man, the one she is bound to, cannot bear to be the reason that man cries. His love is so complete that it refuses to be cruel, even to a rival. He would rather hold his longing in silence than buy his happiness with someone else’s pain.

What the listener is left holding is a love that gives up everything except faithfulness. He lets her go in this life, asks nothing, hurts no one, and stakes his whole hope on lifetimes that have not yet come. It is one of the most tender forms of heartbreak in Sinhala music, the love that loses, stays kind, and keeps believing in tomorrow even when tomorrow means another birth entirely.