Mandakini

I will not kiss that soft, unblemished face
with rough lips, never, because I love you
Your smile, like a string of pearls, has beaten
the blue water lilies, always, because of your beauty
All night, the whole night through, I stay awake
I lay awake, alone inside a dream I was thinking up…….

I made you my painting, my embroidery,
that is what I did, Mandakini
Let me kiss you, just softly,
my flower Malini, the one I hide in my arms…..

The way you flutter your eyelashes
the world is bathed in darkness for hours on end
When you called out to me with gentle words
my heart opened, and I knew I loved you…..

I made you my painting….

Moon doe who came down out of the blue sky
let us meet at the edge of the lake, my princess
You who set me alight with those long eyes
I will kiss you when we meet again, some day to come, my love…..

I made you my painting…….

He is awake again, the whole night, holding on to a girl he can only reach inside his own head. That is where this song sits, in the long hours after midnight when a young man keeps turning over a face he has never touched. He calls her Mandakini, and the name is doing quiet work: in Sinhala and Sanskrit, Mandākinī is the river of heaven, the Milky Way, the Ganga that flows through the sky. Calling her that places her above him and out of reach in the same breath.

The first lines are all restraint. He says he will not put rough lips on that soft, unmarked face, and love itself is his reason. In Sinhala love songs that holding back is the highest compliment a man can pay a woman: she is too fine for his hands. Then the praise arrives in images every Sri Lankan listener recognises at once. Her smile is a string of pearls, bright enough to beat the nil manel, the blue water lily our poets always reach for when they describe a woman’s eyes and her beauty. The flower loses the contest, and that is the whole point of the line.

The chorus is the loveliest turn in the song. He says he made her a painting and an embroidery, which is his way of saying she exists for him as something he made himself and keeps, thread by thread, in his mind. He calls her Malini, the flower-decked one, and says he hides her in his arms. None of it has happened out in the world. It happened at night, on his own, inside a dream he built.

In the last verse he brings the moon down for her. Sanda savi, the little hare or doe people see in the face of the moon, is what a Sinhala singer reaches for when he means something small, soft and precious, so the name is tenderness rather than grand praise. He asks her to meet him at the edge of the lake, the old meeting place of village love songs, and he says that when she lowers those long lashes the world goes dark for hours, because her eyes are the only light he has to work by. Even so, the kiss stays in the future. Some day to come, when we meet again. That promise, made and never collected, is what you are left holding when the song ends.