Dethun Wathawak Oba Amathuwemi Lyrics by Milton Perera

I have called you two or three times
just to ask how you are.
Do you still remember my phone number?
Call me for a moment…

I have no good fortune left to see your face now,
yet even being remembered makes me happy.
Your voice, falling straight onto my ears,
I so long just to hear it…

I have called you two or three times….

More often than I blink my eyes,
the thought of you comes to me.
Like an infant sobbing and crying,
my heart breaks down and weeps…

I have called you two or three times….

A man is holding a phone, working up the courage to call someone he once loved and has now lost. He has already tried two or three times, telling himself it is only to ask how she is doing, and he wonders, half afraid, whether she even keeps his number anymore. That small, ordinary detail, the phone number, is what makes the song ache. He is not asking to come back into her life. He is only asking for a moment of talk, a chance to hear her say something.

What he has given up on is even more telling. He admits he no longer has the good fortune to see her face. The Sinhala phrase here, “pin natha,” literally means he lacks the merit for it, the quiet Buddhist idea that some joys are simply not earned for you in this life. So he lowers what he is hoping for: not her face, not her presence, just her voice landing on his ears. He says even being remembered by her would be enough to make him happy. That is how far love has shrunk, down to wanting only to be a name she has not forgotten.

The last verse opens the grief all the way. He thinks of her more often than he blinks, an image that says the missing never stops, not even for a second. And then the line that gives the song its weight: his heart weeps like a small child crying its breath away. In Sinhala the picture of the “kiri daruwa,” the milk-fed infant breaking into helpless sobs, is the most defenseless kind of crying there is, with no pride and no holding back. A grown man comparing his heart to that infant is admitting he is undone.

It helps to know whose hands this came from. The words are by Karunarathna Abeysekara and the music by Victor Rathnayake, two of the finest in Sinhala song, and Milton Perera sings it. They take something as plain as wanting to make a phone call and turn it into one of the gentlest songs of longing in the language. What stays with you is the smallness of the request set against the size of the loss. He asks for so little, only a moment, only a voice, and you understand that he is asking for it because everything larger is already gone.