Api Kawuruda Lyrics

Thoughts scattered into pieces
Like the froth quivering on a water bubble, gone in a moment
When I sat alone with no one around
It felt like falling into a mine of dreams, and there is no end to it

Time that passes moment by moment
Everyone feels it the same way
The burning sun, the coolness of the moon
In between, we keep searching, who are we?
A world that has songs, a world painted like a picture
In between, we keep asking, keep looking, who are we?

In the twilight hour when the sun goes down
In the dark sky where a star or two begin to shine, ho wo wo
Bathed in a rhythm that flows and falls
We drift far, further away, floating like the wind

Time that passes moment by moment
Everyone feels it the same way
The burning sun, the coolness of the moon
In between, we keep searching, who are we?
A world that has songs, a world painted like a picture
In between, we keep asking, keep looking, who are we?

The burning sun, the coolness of the moon
In between, we keep searching, who are we?
A world that has songs, a world painted like a picture
In between, we keep asking, keep looking, who are we?

This is a song about the question people ask themselves when the day goes quiet and there is nobody around to answer. There is no lover in it, no village being missed, no story. Just one voice turning over the oldest question there is, “who are we”, and admitting that it never gets settled.

It starts inside a restless head. The thoughts are described as shattered into pieces, and then compared to the little bit of froth that trembles on a bubble in water, there for a second and then gone. That image does a lot of work in Sinhala. A water bubble is the standing picture of something beautiful and completely temporary, and the froth on top of it is even more fragile than the bubble. So the singer is saying that his own thinking has no more solidity than that. Then comes the loneliness, and the line about falling into a mine of dreams. A mine is dug deeper and deeper and still yields more, which is why he adds that there is no end to it. Sitting alone, the dreams keep coming up out of him and the digging never stops.

The chorus widens out from one man to everybody. Time slips away moment by moment, and here he makes a point of saying that it feels the same to every single person, rich or poor, young or old. Between the burning sun and the cool of the moon, meaning between the harsh stretches and the gentle ones, between heat and rest, day and night, we spend the whole of life searching. He calls the world one that has songs in it, one that has been painted like a picture, so he is not calling life ugly. It is full of music and colour, and even standing in the middle of all that beauty we are still asking who we are.

The last verse gives the feeling a place to sit. Sunset, the sky going dark, one star and then another coming out, and the singer carried along in a rhythm that flows and falls until he is drifting far away like the wind. That is the whole answer the song is willing to give. No conclusion arrives, no truth gets handed over. You are left with the calm of dusk, a question still open, and the strange comfort of knowing that the person next to you is carrying the same one.