Me Tharam Siyumalida Kalugal Lyrics by Sunil Edirisinghe

How could stone be this delicate
It’s hard even to imagine
I went searching even for the Buddha
Searching for that gifted man
Searching for that gifted man .. ..

In the shade of the iluk grass by the old tank
He had spread a mat on the bare earth
He gazes, soothing his own aches
At the waves dying and being born again
At the waves dying and being born again .. ..

“The lover you carved there at Isurumuniya,
where is she now?” I asked.
When he heard me he only smiled,
“Is she still alone?” he said.
“Is she still alone?” he said .. ..

This song stands in front of the Isurumuniya lovers, the famous stone carving at Anuradhapura where a man and woman sit pressed close together, cut into the rock more than a thousand years ago. The singer is not the lover in the carving. He is a visitor, a seeker, struck by the sheer tenderness of stone, and what he really goes looking for is the sculptor who made it. The whole song is a quiet wondering: who was the man whose hands could make hard rock feel this soft, and what did he carry in his own heart to carve love like that.

The opening line carries the awe. How could stone be this delicate, he says, the question almost too big to hold. So he sets out searching, and notice how he puts it: he went searching even past the Buddha, looking for “das dun minisa,” the man of the thousand-gifted hands, the master craftsman. In a Buddhist land, to say you went looking even further than the Buddha for this man is to place the artist almost beyond reckoning. The gift here is the skill in his fingers, the thousand things those hands could give shape to.

Then the imagined meeting. He finds the sculptor by the old “wewa,” the great irrigation tank, in the shade of the iluk reeds, sitting on a simple mat thrown over bare ground. There is no grandeur to him. He sits soothing his own aches and watches the waves on the water rise and fall, “marena ipadena rala,” the waves that die and are born again. That single image holds the whole Buddhist sense of the song: each wave forming, breaking, forming again, the way lives come and go in saṃsāra, the endless round of birth and death. The man who carved two lovers into permanence sits watching impermanence wash in and out at his feet.

The ending is the ache. The visitor asks him plainly, the woman you carved at Isurumuniya, where is she now. And the old sculptor does not answer with a name or a story. He only smiles and asks back, is she still alone. In that gentle reply the lovers in the stone stop being a monument and become real, a woman who waited, a love left unfinished, perhaps the sculptor’s own. He carved her beside her beloved so she would never be alone, and after a thousand years his only question is whether she still is. It leaves you holding the strange tenderness of it, that an artist’s deepest wish was simply that the person he loved should not be lonely, even in stone.