Upul Nuwan Widaha (Cover) Lyrics by Milton Mallawarachchi

With your blue water-lily eyes opened wide, you smiled
And I smiled too
You turned me soft as a wisp of cotton, you lucky girl
Her name is Mona Lisa

In the wind that sweeps through my heart
The way you came to me, my love
Is all I ever longed for
The fragrance, the flower, all of it is you

Cooling away the weariness
Rising in waves along the way
Those dewdrops held me close and stirred up hidden feelings
Looking out from the window of the palace of my dreams
The one I saw is who stilled the web of my heart

A young man is caught completely by a girl, and the whole song is him trying to put words to that feeling. It opens with the moment their eyes meet. He sees her glance up at him, smiles back, and from that one exchange he is gone. He even gives her a name, Mona Lisa, the way you do when someone seems too lovely and mysterious to be ordinary.

The imagery here is the soft, classical language of Sinhala love song. He calls her eyes “upul nuwan”, blue water-lily eyes. The blue lotus is the standing image of cool, calm beauty in Sinhala poetry, so he is saying her look is gentle and serene, not dazzling but quietly disarming. When he says she has turned him into a wisp of cotton, he means he has gone weightless and helpless, no resistance left in him, ready to drift wherever she takes him. The fragrance and the flower he keeps returning to are not separate things he wants, they are her. She is the sweetness and the beauty both.

The last verse moves into the feeling of being near her. The cool wind easing his tiredness, the dewdrops, the little shiver they bring, these are all the small physical sensations of new love, the body responding before the mind can. The “palace of dreams” is exactly that, the world he builds in his head where she lives, and looking out from its window he sees the one person who finally quiets the restless tangle of his heart. That is where the song lands, on the calm that comes when longing finds the person it was meant for.