Mal Liyakam Randi Lyrics by Victor Rathnayake

Haa… aaa…

Flower vines drawn around, painting our thoughts of love
With a fan of love, who is it
waving a cool breeze
Strange feelings I cannot put into words
welling up in your eyes

The flower prince and princess, shy and teasing
turn away and smile
In a kinnara grove
the color of pearl
let us hide, the two of us
let us hide, the two of us

A bed of ketaki flowers laid out in gold
let us join hands and go, my darling
A world filled with jasmine is ours
in this dream paradise
my angel
in this dream paradise
my angel

A young man and the girl he loves are slipping away together into a world of their own, and the whole song is that giddy, hopeful feeling of new love dressed up as a fairy tale. He sees their love painted all around him like flower vines twisting across a wall, and he can hardly believe what is happening. Some unfamiliar, wordless feeling keeps rising up, and he reads it in her eyes too, so the falling is happening on both sides at once.

The imagery here is the soft, classical language Sinhala love songs reach for when they want a romance to feel pure and almost magical. The “wijinipath,” the fan that someone unseen waves to send a cool breeze, is the old picture of being tended and adored, the way royalty in stories were fanned and cooled. He calls the two of them a flower prince and princess, the playful, shy young lovers who turn away from each other and then smile, that tender awkwardness everyone remembers from their first real attraction. When he wants the two of them to hide away together, he sets it in a “kinduru kodewwe,” a grove of the kinnara, the half-bird, half-human beings of myth who are famous for being devoted, inseparable mates. Hiding there, the color of pearl, means hiding inside a love as faithful and gentle as theirs.

The last verse turns the dream into a place they walk into hand in hand. The ketaki and the jasmine (pichcha) are sweet, white, fragrant flowers, and in Sinhala song a path or a bed of these blossoms, here laid out in gold, stands for a life made soft and beautiful and rare. A world filled with jasmine, the flower of purity and quiet sweetness, is the gift he is offering her. He keeps coming back to the same closing breath, calling it a dream paradise and calling her his angel, his “suranganawi,” the fairy-woman of stories.

What the listener is left holding is that lightness, the wish that love could be exactly this, two people slipping out of the ordinary world into a private one made of flowers and faithful kinnara birds and golden paths, where nothing intrudes and the two of them simply belong to each other.