Bak Mee Male Lyrics by Victor Rathnayake

On the bak-mee blossoms the bees rise up
in the song they are singing
our love story, yours and mine,
was it not heard there, my dear?

The day I saw the wonder of your beauty
as butterflies brushed past my eyes
thinking of you like a cluster of flowers
I stayed clinging close to you

In the fragrance of the ran-keeriya blooms
the ripples of your smile bring me comfort
my heart, which had taken its vows,
on seeing you, felt its robes slipping loose

This is a love song steeped in the Sinhala month of Bak, April, the season of blossoming and the traditional New Year. The bak-mee tree is in flower, bees rise humming over the blooms, and the singer imagines that in their humming song even the bees are retelling “our love story.” From the first line, nature itself is a witness and a participant in the romance.

The middle verse remembers the moment he fell. On the day he first saw “the wonder of her beauty,” butterflies seemed to brush past his eyes, and he pictured her as a whole cluster of flowers, staying close, unable to pull away. It is the tender, slightly dizzy language of first attraction, everything around him turning soft and floral.

The last verse holds the song’s loveliest image. In the scent of the ran-keeriya blossoms, her smile ripples across her face and soothes him, and then he confesses the depth of his undoing: his was a heart that had “taken its vows,” a mind schooled in restraint, like one who has taken sil, the Buddhist precepts. Yet on seeing her, that discipline came loose, “its robes slipping,” the way a devotee’s white cloth slips from the shoulder. It is a gentle, respectful way of saying that even a heart trained to renounce desire could not hold out against her. What the listener is left with is the fragrance of an April romance, sweet, natural, and quietly overwhelming.