Serandib Mal Lyrics by Sanjeew Lonlies

On the roads abroad, among the white folk, I too am walking…
seen and unseen, the Serendib flowers drift on, aimless, upon a wind of dollars…
love’s warmth is needed always, and in a cold season the kisses blur and fade…
yet that last kiss still keeps burning inside the heart…

In places too hard to bear, untellable stories get written, aimlessly, on the bar-napkins…
on a long, thunder-dark night, one day, smearing sorrow across the clouds, the Serendib flowers just float on…

Beneath a branded overcoat, an unfamiliar exhaustion is tightly hidden,
ice-mountains and volcanoes thrown together, the little local dialect collides…
under the street-decorating lamplight, thousands of conversations murmur…
in far-off villages, the bruised petals of hearts rise up again, somewhere in the world…

This is a wistful, aching song about Sri Lankans abroad, the Serendib flowers, Serendib being the old name for the island, so its flowers are its people, scattered across the world. The singer walks foreign roads among strangers and sees these flowers, noticed by some and invisible to most, drifting aimlessly on a wind of dollars, carried wherever the money is. He still needs love’s warmth, but in the cold season the kisses blur, and only one last kiss, from home, from a lost love, keeps burning inside him.

The middle names the hidden loneliness of migrant life. In unbearable places, stories that cannot be told get scribbled on bar-napkins, the private griefs of people far from home; and on a long, thunder-dark night the Serendib flowers float on, smearing their sorrow across the clouds. It captures the way exile is carried quietly, in private, behind a working surface.

The last verse makes that surface literal. Beneath a branded overcoat, an unfamiliar exhaustion is tightly hidden, the smart clothes concealing the strain; ice-mountains and volcanoes collide with a small local dialect, the shock of a cold foreign world against the language and warmth of home. Under festive streetlamps a thousand murmured conversations go on, and, far away, the bruised petals of village hearts rise again somewhere else in the world, people rebuilding lives far from where they were broken. Written and sung by Sanjeew Lonlies with Chaam, it is a tender tribute to the loneliness and resilience of the Sri Lankan diaspora.