Konde Digata Wawala Lyrics by Uresha Ravihari

Growing his hair out long,
Setting it in a curl,
Wearing his denim jeans,
That’s how my lover dresses.
He still has no job,
And no mind to go looking for one.
Off in his gang of friends,
Wandering here and there,
my lover.

I sat waiting,
watching for him to finish work.

When it comes to sweet talk of love,
he is so very good at it.
Building castles in the sky,
fooling this heart of mine,
leaving me with nothing but sorrow,
off he goes, my lover.

He gave a little kiss
on my cheek,
and that gift he handed me
on lovers’ day,
he asked me to give it back,
to turn into cash tomorrow.
Leaving me with nothing but sorrow,
off he goes, my lover.

A young woman is in love with a boy who is, by any honest measure, a wastrel, and the song is her half-fond, half-fed-up account of him. She paints his picture first: hair grown long and set in a fashionable curl, a pair of denim jeans, the whole look of someone who cares more about style than about earning a living. He has no job and no intention of finding one. He drifts through his days in a gang of friends, wandering from place to place while she sits at home waiting, watching for him to come back as if he had any work to finish.

The ache underneath the teasing is real. He is wonderful with words, and that is exactly the problem. When she says he is good at sweet talk, she means he can promise her anything, and the next line gives away how empty those promises are. “Ahas maaliga hadala” means building palaces in the sky, the Sinhala way of describing grand castles in the air that will never be built. He spins beautiful futures for her that have no ground under them, and she knows, even as he talks, that he is fooling her own heart.

Then comes the detail that turns the song from a soft complaint into something sharper and funnier and sadder all at once. On “pemwathunge dinaya,” lovers’ day, the Sri Lankan name for Valentine’s Day, he gave her a little kiss on the cheek and a gift. Later he came back and asked for the gift back, so he could sell it for cash. That single image tells you everything: this is a man so broke and so shameless that even his one romantic gesture was something he needed to pawn.

What stays with you is her tone. She is not crying so much as shaking her head, caught between loving this charming, useless boy and seeing him for exactly what he is. The refrain, “it hurts me, and still he leaves,” is the closest she comes to grief, but the whole song carries a wry smile inside the hurt, the smile of someone who knows better and cannot quite let go.