Hadawatha Gahena (Dase Oya Ruwa Mawila) Lyrics by Viraj Perera

Your face appears before my eyes
A comfort I never find close at hand
Time slips by, slow and quiet
And still the two of us drift further apart

After a moment when my heart beats and beats
All that comes to mind is those two eyes of yours, always
How am I supposed to live, set free from you
In this saṃsāra (the cycle of rebirth) your happiness is all I want

In the night sky the stars are not smiling now
Where are you, leaving me alone today
In my world you were all I had
When you left, sorrow was the only thing I was given
Lonely, all by myself, I am still here
The love you gave me back when you were near
has become my whole life

There is no one I know who is like you
Who feels my pain the way these eyes of mine do
Let me find peace in your gaze
Let me die right there beside you, held in your arms

Lonely, all by myself, I am still here
The love you gave me back when you were near
has become my whole life

A young man is sitting with a love that has already left him, and he cannot let it go. Her face keeps rising in front of his eyes, and the peace he is looking for is never within reach. The days pass slowly, but instead of bringing him closer to healing, they only push the two of them further apart. That is the ache the whole song lives in: time moving on while his heart refuses to.

The lines lean on a few quiet images that a Sri Lankan listener feels right away. When he says his heart “beats and beats” and then only her two eyes come to mind, the eyes stand for the whole person he lost, the one detail that holds all his memory of her. The night sky carries the same weight. He looks up and the stars “are not smiling,” which in Sinhala song is a way of saying the world itself has gone cold and joyless now that she is gone; even the sky has stopped being kind to him. He calls her his entire world, and says that when she walked away the only thing she handed him was sorrow.

The hardest line is about saṃsāra, the Buddhist cycle of birth and rebirth. He does not just want her in this life; he says that through all of saṃsāra, life after life, her happiness is the one thing he wants. That is how Sinhala lyrics raise love to its highest pitch, by stretching it across many lifetimes rather than one. And at the end he stops asking to be free of her. He would rather find his peace in her eyes and die right there beside her, held close, than live without her.

What the listener is left holding is that last turn, the way grief stops fighting and surrenders. He is alone, talking to someone who is no longer there, and the love she gave him long ago has quietly become the only thing his life is made of now.