Wassanayata Atha Wanala Lyrics by Umariya Sinhawansa

Reaching out a hand to the rainy season, let’s go, watching the road
The garden has turned to forest, look
Won’t you stay holding my hand, my darling
Without you, I get no warmth at all….

In the rain that gives kisses, inside the rainbow
Shall we drift into each other’s arms…
In your eyes, I saw myself
For this whole saṃsāra (all our lifetimes), I have been yours
Will you still stay holding my hand, my darling
For this whole saṃsāra, isn’t this mine

Inside the falling tears, in the madness of blossoming flowers
Shall we hide ourselves away in the warmth
In the days we ran chasing butterflies
Now give yourself to me, you became mine
Why hold my hand so tightly, my darling
If I come to you, are you mine to keep

Two young lovers are out in the rain, hand in hand, and the whole song is them asking each other to stay close while the world washes clean around them. The voice goes back and forth between a young man and a young woman, the way Sinhala duets often do, one of them reaching out and the other answering, so it reads less like one person’s confession and more like two people promising the same thing at once.

The season they keep singing to is wassanaya, the monsoon rains, and in Sri Lankan song the rains are never just weather. They are renewal, the land going green, everything soft and alive again, and here the lovers stretch a hand out into that downpour as if to pull the season itself into their love. When they say the garden has turned to forest, they mean it has grown lush and wild and overgrown, a place to disappear into together. The rain that “gives kisses” and the rainbow stretched over it turn the storm into something tender instead of harsh, and they ask whether they should just drift off into each other’s arms inside it.

The heart of the song is the word saṃsāra, the Buddhist cycle of birth and rebirth that runs through so much of Sinhala love poetry. When the singer says “for this whole saṃsāra I have been yours,” it is the biggest promise a Sri Lankan lover can make. Not just for this life, but for every life, lifetime after lifetime, I belong to you. Seeing yourself reflected in the other person’s eyes is the everyday image they use for it, two people so close that one looks into the other and finds their own face looking back.

By the last verse the warmth they keep asking for, that unuhuma, is the real thing they are after, the simple heat of being held. They remember being children chasing butterflies, that innocent early time, and now they want that same closeness as grown lovers. The song leaves you with the gentlest kind of question, the one new couples ask without quite saying it out loud: if I come to you, will you really keep me. The whole thing is warm and unhurried, a love that wants to last not just through this rainy season but through all the lifetimes to come.