Api Kawuruda (Sisikada Wisurunu)

Thoughts scattered in pieces
gone like foam dancing on a water bubble
When I am left on my own
it is like falling into a mine of dreams, with no end to it

Time that passes moment by moment
feels the same to everyone
Between the burning sun and the cool of the moon
we keep searching, searching, who are we
The world is a song already painted
and inside it we listen, we look, who are we

In the dusk hour when the sun goes down
under a dark sky where a star or two starts to shine
bathed in the rhythm that flows over us
we drift farther and farther away, floating like the wind

Moment by moment….

Between the burning sun and the cool of the moon
we keep searching, searching, who are we
The world is a song already painted
and inside it we listen, we look, who are we……

There is no lover in this song and nobody is being missed. What the voice is turning over is the older question, the one that shows up when the house goes quiet and you are left with your own head: who are we, actually, and what is all of this.

It opens with thoughts in pieces, scattered the way “see see kada” suggests, broken bits that will not hold together. Then they are gone, like the froth that shivers on a water bubble and disappears when you look at it. Foam and bubbles carry real weight in Sinhala, they come straight out of the Buddhist way of describing anything that looks solid and is not, and the line uses that quietly rather than preaching it. Being alone does not bring peace here either. Solitude turns into a mine of dreams, an “aakaraya”, a seam you keep digging into that never runs out and never gives you the bottom.

The chorus widens the frame from one person to everybody. Time slips away minute by minute and it does that at the same speed for every one of us, the rich, the poor, the settled, the lost. Between the scorching sun and the cool of the moon is a very Sinhala way of drawing the whole spread of living: heat and relief, day and night, the hard stretches and the soft ones. Life happens in that gap, and the question keeps coming back through all of it. Then the sharpest image in the song, the world as a song that was already composed, already painted. We are not writing it. We are inside it, listening and watching and asking who we are while it plays.

The last verse settles into that dusk hour Sri Lankans know well, “gomman yaame”, when the sun has just gone and one or two stars come out over a darkening sky. The voice lets go, gets carried by the rhythm running through everything, and drifts off like something floating on the wind. That is where the song leaves you. No answer arrives, and the song is honest enough not to hand you one. What you are left holding is the calm that comes when you stop fighting the question and let it carry you, sitting in the half light with a song you did not write playing all around you.