Ma Sandata Kemathi Bawa Lyrics

Knowing that I loved the moon
you took the moon away from the sky
Knowing that I loved the flower
you took the flower off its stem….

From between lips no one had touched
you tore the smile away
You, the man with no heart,
you brought the tears into my eyes…..

Knowing that I loved the moon…

Shut away in a one, pillared house,
a butterfly with no one of her own
You took her whole life
and all you gave her was pain….

Knowing that I loved the moon…

A woman is talking straight to the man who broke her, and she is not raising her voice. She simply lists what he did. Every time she showed him something she loved, he found a way to take it from her, and the song is her saying that out loud, calmly, which somehow hurts more than shouting would.

The first verse is the whole accusation in four lines. She loved the moon, so he pulled it out of the sky. She loved a flower, so he snapped it off the stem. Neither of those is a thing a person can actually do, and that is the point. In Sinhala song the moon is the far away, gentle thing you can only look at and love from where you stand, and a flower on its stem is something alive and blooming in its own time. He could not reach either one, so what she is really saying is that he reached into her instead, and killed the loving. Wanting something was enough to make him destroy it.

The second verse moves from the sky down to her own face. “Lips no one had touched” carries the sense of something clean and unspoiled, a mouth that had never been used up by anyone, and the smile on it was hers. He tore it off. Then she names him plainly, the man with no heart, and the only thing left in her eyes now is water. That is the trade the song keeps circling, a smile taken and tears put in its place.

The last verse steps back and speaks about her in the third person, as if she can only look at her own life from the outside now. The “ektam geya”, the one, pillared house, is the tower out of old Sinhala story where a girl is shut away alone, and that is the image she reaches for. Inside it she is a butterfly with nobody, a creature that is meant to be out in the open and instead has been kept. He took the whole life, not a season of it, and left pain where the life used to be. Sunil Ariyarathna gives her no revenge and no final curse. She just states the account, and the listener is the one left holding it.