Eda Meda Thura Lyrics by Sanath Nandasiri

From that day to this, opened by tears,
the window-shutters of your eyes closed shut.
The warmth of love that once flowed through your heart,
those red lips that brimmed with smiles, sealed now.
The rose petals withered away,
draining your cheeks to a pale, pale white.
Hands folded on your breast for the last journey,
my darling, you left without a word to me.

As teardrops well at the corners of my eyes,
spilling down past the windows of my sight,
no matter who else stands around me, I keep thinking
I want to bend down low over your lips.
Everyone takes their leave and moves away,
and though they bathe your face with scented water,
to me and to my heart you are fragrant still,
I will never be parted from that fragrance.

From that day to this, opened by tears,
the window-shutters of your eyes closed shut.
Hands folded on your breast for the last journey,
my darling, you left without a word to me.

Born yesterday, only to die today,
in a heart that came into being with so much longing,
a world of love that rose on the speed of dreams
right up to the height of the sky, it is there tomorrow too.
But now, my darling, you are gone,
why have I been left alone in this world?
One day again, may we be born as two of one heart,
born together, my love.

From that day to this, opened by tears,
the window-shutters of your eyes closed shut.
The warmth of love that once flowed through your heart,
those red lips that brimmed with smiles, sealed now.
The rose petals withered away,
draining your cheeks to a pale, pale white.
Hands folded on your breast for the last journey,
my darling, you left without a word to me.

A man is standing beside the woman he loved, and she is dead. This is a song of grief, sung at the last parting, and from the very first line you understand that the eyes he is looking at will never open again. He keeps returning to one wound through the whole song: she left without telling him, without a single word of goodbye.

Watch how the opening describes her face. Her eyes, which had so often filled with tears in life, are closed now, and he calls the eyelids “window-shutters” drawn over a window. It is a gentle, domestic image for death, the shutters of a home pulled closed at the end of the day. The red lips that used to be full of smiles are sealed. And then the image every Sri Lankan listener feels in the chest: the rose petals have wilted and her cheeks have gone pale. In Sinhala song a fresh, rosy cheek is the color of life and youth; here the color drains away, the rose dies, and the paleness is the pallor of death itself. The line about hands folded on her breast is not a soft poetic touch, it is the exact way a body is laid out for the final journey, the cremation, in a Sri Lankan home. He is naming what he is looking at.

The middle of the song is where the love refuses to let go. As his tears fall, all he wants is to lean down close over her lips one more time, even with mourners crowded around him. And here he reaches for the deepest image in the song. By custom the body is washed and the face cleansed with fragrant water before it is taken away, a final act of care. He watches them do it, and he tells her that no washing can take her scent from him. To him she is still fragrant, and from that fragrance, the memory and presence of her, he will never be separated. What others can wash from her body, he carries in his heart.

In the last verse he tries to make sense of it. Their love had risen as fast and as high as a dream reaching the sky, and he tells himself that love still exists, it will be there tomorrow too. But the comfort breaks the moment he says it, because she is not. “Why have I been left alone in this world?” is the cry at the center of the song. He closes not with despair but with the one hope a grieving Sri Lankan heart turns to, the hope of saṃsāra, the cycle of rebirth: let us be born again one day, two people of one heart, born together. It is the prayer that this parting is not the end, only an interval, and that love this true will find its way back into another life. That is what the listener is left holding, a sorrow softened by the belief that they will meet again.