Sansarini Lyrics by Yasas Medagedara

It’s the tears that tell of that hidden love
Today I finally know that love I never spoke of

O moon, how do I even say
this love I hold in my heart,
that you left me spellbound… the day I first saw you…
The pain in my eyes is fading away
because of your beauty,
my heart drifted off and floated far away….

A rain of love pours down and soaks me through…
and today the trembling in my heart goes still…

Sansarini, my own (my companion through saṃsāra, the cycle of rebirth) – you stranger I have never met
in the dream I am dreaming – it’s as if you are here//

A loveliness not even the rainbow can hold
hides itself right there beside you…
This first love of mine…
ties itself to my heart again and again…

A rain of love pours down and soaks me through…
and today the trembling in my heart goes still…

Sansarini, my own (my companion through saṃsāra, the cycle of rebirth) – you stranger I have never met
in the dream I am dreaming – it’s as if you are here//

A young man has fallen in love, and the whole song is him trying to put words to a feeling that until now he could only cry about. He opens by admitting that his tears spoke before he ever could. He had been carrying this love in secret, and only now, with it spilling out of him, does he truly understand what it is.

From there he turns and speaks straight to the girl, and notice who he reaches for to describe her: the moon. In Sinhala song the moon is the standing image of a calm, gentle beauty, soft light that soothes the dark rather than dazzles, so when he calls out to her as the moon he is saying her presence settles him. The ache in his eyes, the unrest in his heart, all of it quiets down just from her face. He describes himself as spellbound from the very first look, his heart slipping its moorings and floating somewhere far away. Then comes the line that gives the song its weather: love falls on him like rain and soaks him through, and the shaking inside him goes still. Rain in this kind of lyric is relief and renewal, the cool that comes after a long dry heat, so being soaked in love is not a small thing here, it is a whole body finally being calmed.

The word he keeps returning to is the one in the title. He calls her Sansarini, which comes from saṃsāra, the Buddhist cycle of birth and rebirth, and it carries a tender belief many Sri Lankans hold close: that two people who are meant for each other have found one another not just in this life but across many. So in the same breath he calls her a stranger he has never met and his Sansarini, his companion through all those lifetimes. She feels brand new and somehow already his. He even admits that right now she lives in a dream, yet she is so vivid that it is as if she is really there.

In the last verse he says her beauty is something not even the rainbow can hold, that all of nature’s color seems to hide itself beside her, and he names this plainly as his first love, the one that keeps binding itself to his heart over and over. What the listener is left holding is that particular wonder of falling for someone for the first time, when the feeling is so large it borrows the moon, the rain and the idea of past lives just to say what one heart cannot.