Sulange Pawee Lyrics by Milton Mallawarachchi

Carried on the wind, drift to where she is,
the thoughts that fill my mind,
brought down from a palace of dreams,
the wishes my heart wished.

Then, looking my way,
glancing from the corner of her eyes,
those secret words she spoke
were never heard aloud.

Carried on the wind…

In the pages where I wrote my song,
in this song of sorrow,
the wellspring is your eyes, my love,
the soft glances you cast.

Carried on the wind…

A young man is in love and aching to reach a girl he cannot be with, so he hands his longing over to the wind. He asks the breeze to carry his thoughts and his quiet wishes to wherever she is, the wishes he keeps stored away in a dream world rather than out in the open. From the very first lines you can feel that this is a love he holds in private, something he can send to her only on the air.

The middle of the song is one small, precise memory. Once, she looked at him, just a glance from the corner of her eyes, and in that look she said something she could never say out loud. In Sinhala love songs the sidelong look, the neth konin balma, is a whole language of its own. A girl who cannot speak her feelings says them with her eyes instead, and he caught that secret. The tender part is the ending of that verse, those secret words were never spoken aloud, so all that passed between them lived in a single shared look and went no further.

That unspoken glance is exactly what becomes his song. He tells us that what he writes, this song of sorrow, springs from her eyes and from the soft looks she gave him. The image of her gaze as a wellspring is lovely here, her glances are the source the whole song flows from, the way a stream flows from a spring. The grief is not bitter. It is the quiet sadness of carrying a love you could never put into words, turning a single look into a song and trusting the wind to take the rest of it to her.