Sikuruliya Lyrics by Milton Perera

Film: Sikuruliya (1975)

Tender woman, innocent woman,
she left me behind and went away.
Delicate one, my Sikuruliya,
delicate one, my Sikuruliya.

Giving my body her cool, soft touch,
the golden fragrance of her breast,
I, who tasted the honey of her lips,
my Sikuruliya,
she left me behind and went away, my Sikuruliya.

Tender woman, innocent woman,
she left me behind and went away.
Delicate one, my Sikuruliya,
delicate one, my Sikuruliya.

It was you my eyes drew, fair one,
and today those same eyes shed their tears.
You were the one I raised with love,
my Sikuruliya,
she left me behind and went away,
my Sikuruliya.

Tender woman, innocent woman,
she left me behind and went away.
Delicate one, my Sikuruliya,
delicate one, my Sikuruliya.

Because I loved you so,
my heart has known this sorrow.
She left me behind and went away, my Sikuruliya.

Tender woman, innocent woman,
she left me behind and went away.
Delicate one, my Sikuruliya,
(delicate one, my Sikuruliya)..//

A young man sings to the woman he loved and lost, the woman he calls his Sikuruliya. The word is the heart of the song. Sikura is Venus, the morning star, the brightest light in the sky, and “Sikuruliya” turns that into a name for a woman as radiant and lovely as that star. It is also the title of the 1975 film the song comes from. So every time he says it, he is naming her beauty and his loss in the same breath.

He keeps reaching for the gentlest words Sinhala has for a woman: komala, bolanda, siyumali, all of them meaning tender, soft, innocent, delicate. The word liya is an old poetic one too, a flowering vine, used to picture a woman who is graceful and slender. He is telling us she was fragile and sweet, and that is exactly why it hurts that she could simply leave him behind and walk away.

The middle of the song is full of the closeness they once had. He remembers the cool softness of her touch against his skin, the warm golden fragrance of her body, the honey he tasted from her lips. These are not just pretty pictures. They are the small physical memories that stay with you after someone is gone, the things he cannot stop feeling. Then comes the turn that aches the most: the eyes that once drank in her face are now the eyes that cry over her. He even says he was the one who shaped her with his love, raised her up in his heart, which makes her leaving feel like losing something he himself had given everything to.

By the end he is plain about it. Because he loved her this much, this is the sorrow he carries. There is no anger in it, only the quiet grief of a man left holding the memory of a woman as bright and as far away now as the morning star she was named for.