Sarayatiyen Api Yanena Thura Lyrics by Vijaya Kumarathunga

As long as we travel the road of life
let us stay together through saṃsāra (the cycle of rebirth)
And when we take leave of saṃsāra
let us set out on that journey together too

You met me not in a season when the garden of my life
was blooming with flowers
You met me dying alone
in a thorn-filled, stony stream

From now on I will fill the garden of my heart with flowers
so the fire of grief and tangled sorrow will never rise again
And not only in this saṃsāra
but in every birth still to come

In our births to come, grown close and familiar
loving and playing together
the wish that we met under a tender, blessed star
let us make that wish as we leave saṃsāra behind

I will calm your heart and light it up
this love, a gentle, tender love within the heart
I will come following you through saṃsāra
I will give myself to you, holding you always in my heart

A young man makes a promise to the woman he loves, and it is not a promise for this life alone. He vows to stay beside her as long as they walk the road of life, and then to keep walking with her even after they leave it. To understand what he is really offering, you have to know the word the whole song turns on: saṃsāra, the Buddhist cycle of birth, death and rebirth that every being travels through until release. So when he says he will go with her through saṃsāra, he means across this life and every life after it. That is the biggest thing a Sri Lankan in love can pledge.

The middle of the song is where it grows tender. He tells her she did not meet him at his best. She did not find him when the garden of his life was full of flowers, she found him at his lowest, a man dying alone in a stony stream choked with thorns. The thorns and the cold stream are his suffering, the rough patch of a life. She came to him there, in that hard place, and that is exactly why his love runs so deep. From now on, he says, he will plant flowers in the garden of his own heart, so the fire of grief never flares up between them again.

Then he reaches forward into lives not yet lived. He imagines them in births to come, by then easy and familiar with each other, loving and playing the way two people do when their bond is old and sure. He even wishes they had first met under a tender, lucky star, a nekatha, an auspicious moment in the Sinhala way of marking time, and he asks that they carry that wish with them as they finally step out of the cycle for good.

By the end the promise is complete. He will soothe her heart and brighten it, follow her through every turn of saṃsāra, and give himself to her with her face held in his mind. It is love spoken in the language of faith, the kind of devotion that does not end with one lifetime but means to outlast death itself.