Oya Nisa Handala Lyrics by Roshan Fernando

Because of you, I cried,
and even my heart was wounded.
The day you got angry and left, I was left all alone,
and I felt the pain.

Remembering you, holding on to your memory, I weep,
and still I find no comfort, none at all.
From the day you broke our love and walked away,
I’ve been left alone, always on my own.

If only I could turn this love of mine into a soft breeze,
and set it loose to drift along and find you,
to become a single sigh carried on that wind,
and reach you, and bind myself to you once more.

A young man has been left behind after a fight, and the song is what’s left of him once she’s gone. It opens on the rawest part of it: she got angry one day and walked out, and ever since he has been alone, carrying a hurt that has gone past sadness into something that actually aches in the chest. When he says even his heart was wounded, he means the pain stopped being just a feeling and started to feel physical, the way real heartbreak does.

The middle of the song is him stuck in the loop everyone knows after a breakup. He keeps remembering her, holding on to the memory instead of letting it go, and the more he holds it the more he cries. He says plainly that no comfort comes, not a bit of it, because the one person who could ease it is the same person who caused it. From the day she broke their love and left, he has simply been on his own, and the loneliness isn’t a passing mood, it’s where he lives now.

The last verse is where the song turns tender and reaches for an image instead of a complaint. He wishes he could turn his love into a soft breeze, the gentle evening wind a Sri Lankan listener pictures drifting through the village, and send it out to search for her. More than that, he wants to become a single sigh riding on that wind, so that even his sorrow could travel to wherever she is. The wind here is the only messenger left to someone who has no other way to reach the person he loves. It carries no anger, only longing, and the quiet wish underneath it all is the simplest one there is: to reach her and be tied to her again, the way they once were.