Soya Awa

A veena in my heart, sounding for all time
That smile you conjured up was my dream
I came looking for you, the way I longed to back then…
Where are you? Never once in my world
You never asked, yet you were drawn into my heart
Your face took shape and stayed in my mind…

I said it that day, in my song
To your eyes that leave my heart raw
My whole intention was there in the song book
Why did you go silent, looking at me and looking past me
I came searching for that smile
I came searching, just as I did back then…

In the veil of the night, may you bathe in the cool of the moonbeams
My lovely one, may I be the balm you smooth on your face
May this love be left standing, always
I longed for you with all my heart, forgive me and hear me out
Don’t leave me in the dark now
Stay beside me always, smiling…
In my song……

A young man is still carrying a girl he never quite reached. She smiled at him once, or he dreamed she did, and that smile has been playing inside him ever since. He calls it a veena in his heart, the old string instrument whose notes go on humming long after the finger has left the string. That is what her smile did to him. It never stopped sounding.

The ache underneath shows up quickly. He asks where she is and then admits the harder thing, that she was never really in his world at all. She never asked for his heart and never answered him, but she moved in anyway, and her face settled in his mind and stayed there. If you have ever loved someone from a small distance, a classmate, a neighbour, a face you saw once, you know the mix of sweetness and helplessness in those lines.

The second verse tells us what he actually did about it. He wrote her a song. He says his intention was there in the song book, which is as close as he ever came to confessing, and he sang it to eyes that were already hurting him. What he got back was silence. He asks why she went quiet, why she looked at him and looked past him in the same glance, and all he can do is go looking for that smile again, the same way he did the first time.

Then the last verse turns from complaint to blessing, and this is the loveliest part of the song. He wishes her the cool of the moonlight in the night’s veil, and in Sinhala song the moon stands for calm, gentle beauty, light that soothes instead of dazzling, so what he is really wishing her is peace. The line after it is the tenderest thing here: he asks to be the balm she smooths on her face, the small ordinary thing she touches every morning without thinking about it. He wants nothing grand, only to be that close and that constant.

He ends by asking her to forgive him, not to leave him standing in the dark, and to stay beside him smiling for good. She never answers. The song simply circles back to where it started, to his song, which is the only place he ever managed to say any of this out loud.