Santhana Susum

Wrapping up the sighs held deep inside,
the Hanthana wind blew over us,
raising little ripples right beside me
(and the river just kept flowing on)

Hidden among the flower-lined lanes,
I looked to see if the kisses we left were still there.
The swinging bridge shook us as we crossed,
and we tested whether we were afraid.

Wrapping up the sighs held deep inside…

Handing the sword over to the Vedda king,
beside the wala, Maname wept.
Hiding all of those memories away,
the Mahaweli just kept flowing on.

Wrapping up the sighs held deep inside…
And the river just kept flowing on…

This is a song about going back to Peradeniya, or at least going back there in your head. The voice belongs to a young man who was in love on that campus and is now standing at some distance from all of it. Almost every image is a real place a Peradeniya student would recognise on sight, which is why the song lands so hard with anyone who spent those years on that hill.

The first line carries a piece of wordplay that English cannot hold. Santhana is an old word for the inner self, the stream of the mind running on from one moment to the next, and it sits right beside Hanthana, the range of hills standing over the university. So the sighs he has folded away inside him and the wind coming down off those hills are nearly the same word, and the wind carries the feeling out of him and drops it on the water. The river below the campus is the Mahaweli, and the word he uses for the way it moves, ohe, means it flows on by itself, unbothered, indifferent to whatever happened on its banks.

The second verse walks the old route. The flower-lined avenue first, then the wel palama, the swinging footbridge over the Mahaweli that every batch crosses. He is searching the flowers for kisses left behind, as if a moment could still be lying where you dropped it. The bridge line is doing two jobs at once. Crossing that swaying bridge is the standard campus dare, so testing whether they were afraid is both a memory of two people laughing halfway across and a quieter question about whether they were brave enough for each other.

Then the song steps into theatre. Maname is Ediriweera Sarachchandra’s 1956 play, the story of the prince whose wife hands his sword to the Vedda king and lets him be killed for it, and the line sets that weeping at the wala, which is also the name of the open-air amphitheatre at Peradeniya where the play was first staged. Every student who has sat on those stone steps knows the scene. Folding his own memory of being given up into that story is a gentle way of saying the same thing happened to him, and that it is an old story on that hill rather than a new one.

The song closes where it opened, with the water. Memories hidden away, the river still moving, nothing dramatic said out loud. The hills still get their wind, the bridge still swings under somebody else now, the play still gets performed, and the girl he shared all of it with is somewhere else. The place stayed exactly as it was, and he is the one left carrying what happened there.