Anganawo Lyrics by Rookantha Gunathilaka

Lovely woman,
you wrote the song and set its rhythm.
In a dream you told me you were mine.

Lovely woman, beautiful one,
you danced your dances,
you gave me sweet nectar to drink.
I live in your world now, now I live in your world.

I’m just one more person in the human world, dear girl,
that’s the story I keep telling.
Nothing has changed, dear girl, so go on and give me
your love.

Lovely woman, beautiful one…

On a cold, cold night, the bright-colored stars,
I’ll pluck them and bring them to you, dear girl.
That bell-like flower of a smile of yours, brushed with the color of the gods,
the love is all mine, dear girl.

Lovely woman…

A young man has fallen for a woman so lovely she feels less like an ordinary girl and more like something out of a dream, and the whole song lives in that hazy, half-asleep space between the real world and a beautiful one he wishes were real. He calls her anganawo and rupikawo, words for a radiant, almost heavenly beauty, the kind of fairy-like woman who sings, who dances, who seems too good to belong to a plain human life. In a dream, he says, she told him she was his, and he has been carrying that dream around ever since.

The opening images are all about being swept off your feet. She wrote the song and set its beat, she danced, she gave him sweet nectar to drink. None of this is literal. He is describing what falling for her feels like, as if her presence alone is music and honey, something that intoxicates him. So he admits, almost helplessly, that he no longer lives in his own world. He lives in hers now. That line, I live in your world now, is the heart of the song, the feeling of being so taken with someone that your own life starts to revolve around theirs.

Then he gets honest and a little shy. He calls her nage, an affectionate Sinhala word a man uses for a younger girl he is fond of, warm and tender rather than formal. He reminds her that he is only an ordinary man, just one more face in the crowd of the human world, telling her this same story. But nothing about how he feels has changed, so he asks her gently to go ahead and give him her love. There is a sweet vulnerability in it, a man who knows he is nothing special asking a woman who seems heavenly to choose him anyway.

The last verse is his promise, and it is pure romance. He says he will climb up into the cold night sky, pluck the colorful stars, and bring them down to her. Reaching for the stars for someone is the old language of love, the lover who would do the impossible just to delight the one he adores. And her smile undoes him completely. He compares it to small bell-shaped flowers, seenu seenu mal, delicate and bright, and says it looks as though the gods themselves painted it. Calling her smile the color of the gods is the highest praise he has, a way of saying she is too beautiful for this earth. The song ends where it began, with him certain of one thing through all the dreaminess: this love is his, and he means to keep it.