Samuganna Awasarai Lyrics by Prasad Priyankara

Let me say goodbye now, goodbye
From your world I take my leave… let me go
Life is like a flower, my love, it has its end
Coming together and parting are the way of the world

On the shore I had longed for with love
Did you see me too, in a dream?
The waves of the tide break my sorrow apart
With every sigh I breathe in your love
I cannot bear this weight of pain
Why do you wound me this much?

Why do you leave me like this?
Why do your eyes call me back this way?
It doesn’t matter, if that is your happiness
It was sweet, that dream-girl of the past
The smiling love still lingers in my memory
Come close, and in a life to come I will keep my vow
Let us say goodbye, and meet once more

A young man is saying goodbye to the woman he loves, and he is trying to be brave about it. He has accepted that they cannot be together, so instead of begging her to stay, he asks for permission to leave her world quietly. That word “awasarai,” permission, sets the tone for the whole song. He is not storming out or blaming her. He is bowing out gently, the way you do when you know the parting is final but you still want to leave with grace.

The way he makes peace with the loss is by reminding himself that this is simply how life works. He compares life to a flower, which blooms beautifully and then must wither and fall. In Sinhala song the flower is the standing image for anything lovely that cannot last, youth, beauty, love itself. By saying coming together and parting are “the way of the world,” he leans on a quietly Buddhist idea that runs through so much Sinhala music: everything that meets must one day separate, so clinging only deepens the hurt.

But the calm cracks in the middle. The sea imagery is where the real feeling lives. He pictures a shore he once longed for, the life and love he hoped to share with her, and asks whether she ever dreamed of him the way he dreamed of her. Then he turns the rolling waves of the tide into the rising and falling of his own grief, each wave breaking against him, each sigh carrying her memory back in. Here the brave face slips and the honest pain shows through, and he finally asks the question he was holding back: why does she keep wounding him, why do her eyes still call him back even as she lets him go.

By the end he chooses tenderness over bitterness. If leaving makes her happy, he tells her, then he wants that for her. He folds her into memory as his “sihina kumari,” his dream-girl, a sweetness that belongs to the past now. And he closes on the most Sri Lankan note of all: a promise made across saṃsāra, the cycle of rebirth. Knowing this life will not let them be together, he vows to keep his promise to her in a life to come. So the goodbye is not really a goodbye. It is a young man choosing to believe that love this true must find them again, somewhere down the long road of rebirths, and asking only that they meet once more.