Kalpa Kalayak Pura (Samanali Theme) Lyrics by Meena PrasadineeSanka Dineth

Across an eon, through the journeys of saṃsāra (the cycle of rebirth),
like a dream, you dawned beside me//
The reason for the soft smile that never leaves your eyes,
that flower-like smile on your lips carried a sign,
that flower-like smile on your lips carried a sign…

In the season when the flowers are searched for nectar,
was it because I came to you in secret//
We brushed by a touch of the eyes,
my heart drifted up into the sky,
that flower-like smile on your lips carried a sign,
that flower-like smile on your lips carried a sign…

Across an eon…

Your heartbeat is like my own breath,
you are with me all the time//
We brushed by a touch of the eyes,
my heart joined yours up in the sky,
that flower-like smile on your lips carried a sign,
that flower-like smile on your lips carried a sign…

Across an eon…

A young woman is telling the one she loves that he feels less like someone she just met and more like someone she has been waiting for across lifetimes. She opens by reaching for the biggest stretch of time her culture knows. A kalpa is an eon, an almost unimaginable age of the world, and saṃsāra is the long Buddhist cycle of birth and rebirth that every soul travels through. To say “across an eon, through the journeys of saṃsāra, you dawned beside me like a dream” is to say this is no ordinary attraction. It feels like the meeting was set in motion births ago, and now it has finally arrived, as quietly and gently as a dream forming.

What holds her is his smile. She keeps returning to one image, “that flower-like smile on your lips,” and she calls it an inaawa, a sign or an omen, almost a small spell. A smile that never quite leaves his eyes, soft as a flower opening, and to her it reads like a quiet promise that something is meant to be. In the second verse she lets herself wonder why he carries that look. She pictures the moment as a flower garden in the season when it is searched for its nectar, and asks, half shy, whether the reason is that she came to him in secret. It is a tender, roundabout way of asking, “is that smile because of me.”

The smaller images do the rest of the work. “We brushed by a touch of the eyes” is the whole love story compressed into one glance, the moment two people’s eyes meet and something passes between them without a word. And when she says “my heart drifted up into the sky,” she means that giddy, weightless lift you feel when you realise someone feels the same, the heart floating free of the ground. By the last verse the closeness is settled and sure. His heartbeat has become as constant as her own breathing, something she no longer has to reach for because it is simply always there, and her heart no longer floats alone in the sky but joins his there.

What the song leaves you with is a calm, certain kind of love rather than a restless one. It is sung as a theme for the film Samanali, and the tenderness suits it, the feeling of finally arriving at a person you were always travelling toward. The smile she cannot stop describing is really her way of saying she has found, after a very long road, exactly where she belongs.