Manike Mama Aye Gedara Enawa Lyrics by MS Fernando

Menike, I’m coming back home
and it makes me so angry…//
No matter how much love I show you,
you still don’t trust me..
I put up with it, I put up with it, but in the end
it makes me furious..

You hit out, you scold, and it hurts my heart,
so I walk out of the house…
Even when I leave saying I won’t come again,
I still come back home…

Menike, I…

It became so sad, all of it,
if it has gone this wrong, leave it be….
Every single day it’s cold like this,
how am I supposed to bear it and stay?
I’m leaving, I’m going, letting it all go,
my patience has run out on me.

One day she’ll come looking for me,
and take me with her, weeping…

Menike, I……………..

Her face is like a rose,
that loving look is what I want..
A lovelier flower I’ll find,
but it’s the rose that holds my heart..
I’ll go looking for another flower,
this flower I won’t give to anyone else..

No harm will ever come to it,
my love won’t let it down..

Menike, I………………..

A young man is caught in that exhausting place where you love someone and they keep doubting you anyway. He is talking straight to his Menike, the girl he is with, and he is fed up. He keeps coming back home to her, but every time he does it makes his blood boil, because no matter how much love he shows, she still suspects him. He says it plainly: I put up with it and put up with it, and in the end it just makes me furious.

The middle of the song is a fight. She hits out and scolds him, it wounds him, so he storms out of the house swearing he is done. But he always walks back in. That push and pull is the whole ache of it. He tells himself he should leave for good, that his patience has finally run dry, and he imagines a day when she will come chasing after him in tears, sorry at last. It’s the kind of thing you say in the heat of an argument more than something you really mean.

Then the anger softens into tenderness, and this is where the Sinhala turns gentle. He calls her face a rose, “rosa malak wage ege moone,” and in Sri Lankan love songs the rose is the standard image for a sweetheart’s beauty, soft, fragrant, the flower you give the one you love. He says he could go find a prettier flower, but it’s this rose that has his heart. The line “this flower I won’t give to anyone else” is him promising she belongs to him alone, and “no harm will ever come to it” is a quiet vow to protect her. His love, he says, will never let her down.

So under all the slammed doors and the temper is a man who simply cannot stay away. The fury and the devotion are the same feeling pulling in two directions, and what you are left holding is how ordinary and human that is, the people who drive us maddest are often the ones we keep coming home to.