Dangakara Oya Dasa Dutuwa Eda Lyrics by Sanath Nandasiri

The day I saw those mischievous eyes
far back in our schooldays
without our knowing, our hearts came together
that one look writing a whole letter …//

Morning and evening, the day we met
we talked, bound up in love …//
smiles blossomed like ripples on the lake of your cheeks
and happily the time went by

The day I saw those mischievous eyes …/

Praying we would be bound forever, life after life
love grew in our hearts …//
but the smile faded from those blue-lily eyes
and in tears we parted and went our ways

The day I saw those mischievous eyes …/

A man is looking back on a first love from his schooldays, and the whole song is wrapped in that ache you feel for something sweet that did not last. It starts with a pair of playful, mischievous eyes he saw long ago, when they were both still at school, and the way he tells it, that single look was enough. Their hearts came together before either of them even noticed it happening.

He calls that first glance a letter, a whole message passed in one look without a single word spoken. From there the feeling only grows. He remembers meeting morning and evening, talking, falling deeper, and the days slipping by in plain happiness. The image he reaches for is tender and very Sinhala: smiles blossoming like ripples on the lake of her cheeks. In Sinhala song the face is often pictured as still water, and a smile spreading across it is a ripple disturbing that calm, so the line is really saying her cheeks dimpled with joy whenever she smiled at him, and he could not stop watching it.

Then the song turns. They had prayed to stay together not just for this life but through saṃsāra, the cycle of birth after birth, the deepest promise two people can make in this culture, where lovers hope to find each other again in lifetime after lifetime. But it was not to be. He calls her eyes nilupul, blue water lilies, the classic image for a beautiful woman’s eyes, and he watches the smile drain out of them. The flower that had bloomed on her cheeks closes again. In the end they part in tears and go their separate ways.

What stays with you is how gently he carries the loss. There is no bitterness, only the memory of those mischievous eyes returning again and again in the refrain, the same eyes that started everything, now belonging to a love he could only keep in memory.