Sobana Sandawe Lyrics by Rohitha Jayasinghe

In the lovely moonlight,
in the cool gentle breeze…
I waited for you to come.

A fragrant flower, the blossom of love //
why, oh why, did you not come…
while darkness spread over the world.

In the lovely moonlight…

The sun-god has sunk into the sea //
he is setting, is he leaving me too…
where are you, my love?

In the lovely moonlight…

Ranjani, Nandani,
come, come quickly, my fair one…
don’t ever forget me.

In the lovely moonlight….

A young man waits out the evening for the girl he loves, and she never comes. That ache of waiting is the whole song. He has picked the most beautiful setting he can imagine for her, soft moonlight, a cool breeze drifting through, and he stands in it watching the light go and the night come on, still hoping she will appear.

The waiting slowly turns into worry. He calls her his fragrant flower, the blossom of his love, the tender Sinhala way of saying she is the sweetest thing in his world, and then asks the question that has been growing in him: why didn’t you come? As he asks it, he notices the darkness spreading over everything, and it is not just the sky getting dark. The fading evening becomes the shape of his own sinking hope.

The image at the heart of the song is the sun going down. He pictures the sun as a god sinking into the sea, the way the day dies on the horizon over the ocean, and in the same breath he wonders if she is “setting” on him too, slipping away and leaving him just as the daylight has. That is the quiet fear underneath all the pretty scenery, that her absence tonight means she is gone for good. Where are you, he asks the empty evening.

By the end he can only call her name, Ranjani, Nandani, and plead with her to come quickly and not to forget him. There is no answer in the song, and that is what makes it land. He is left alone in the beautiful night he prepared for her, holding on to one small hope, that she still remembers him.