Lande Mulawi Giya Nam Lyrics by Rookantha Gunathilaka

My dear, if you’ve been led astray,
then I want no more of your smiles.
Like a deer that chases a mirage,
searching for water across the desert,
you went after it and lost. So what now?
My dear, if you’ve been led astray.

A blind man cannot tell a gem’s worth,
but the gem is worth no less for that.
No one wants a cracked clay pot.
Once it went wrong, no one called it right.

A flower has no fragrance once it withers,
muddied water loses its clarity,
a broken love holds no fresh sweetness.
You walked away, but I was not left alone.

My dear, if you’ve been led astray…

This is a man speaking to a woman who has left him for someone else, and his voice is steady, more wounded pride than open weeping. He has decided he is done. If she has been fooled and led astray by another, he tells her plainly, then he wants none of her smiles anymore. The smile that once meant everything to him is now something he pushes away, because he can see what is behind it.

The strongest image in the song is the deer and the mirage. In the dry plains, a thirsty deer sees shimmering heat on the sand and mistakes it for water, running toward it until it is exhausted and finds nothing. He is telling her that she did exactly that. She chased a false promise, something that looked like love but was only a trick of the light, and now she has worn herself out and lost. “So what now?” he asks, not cruelly so much as flatly, the way you speak when the hurt has hardened into acceptance.

The second and third verses are built almost entirely out of plain Sinhala proverbs, and each one is a quiet way of defending his own worth and naming what cannot be undone. A blind man cannot judge a gem, but that does not make the gem any cheaper, he is the gem, and the fact that she could not see his value is her failing, not his. A cracked pot is no use to anyone, a withered flower has lost its scent, muddied water has lost its clearness, a broken love has lost the freshness it had at the start. Each picture says the same thing from a different angle: once something is spoiled, it cannot be made new again, and there is no going back to what they had.

The last line is where the pride finally shows its full shape. She walked away, but he says he was not left alone. It is the line a person says to keep their dignity, the closing of a door rather than a plea to keep it open. He is letting her know that her leaving did not break him, that he stands fine on his own, and that the loss, if there is one, is hers.