A Nanda Malini Baby

Janaka Samarakoon | Nice, July 21, 2026

I learnt music with her, by listening to what she did with it. I learnt poetry with her, by deciphering the lyrics she sang. I became aware of politics, of class, of injustice, by turning over and over what that voice was telling me - so suave a voice, though not always, for she knew how to turn hard when the stakes rose above art and beauty. And in the end, it was through her that I began to open up to the world. I was five then, or perhaps eight. It went on until I was seventeen, nineteen maybe. She was my spiritual mother. She was my first Sinhala teacher. She was my imagined mentor. She was my favourite singer. She is Nanda Malini. She is no more.

It was thanks to my sister that I discovered first the beauty of her music, and then its power. My sister is ten years older than I am, which meant that I had the privilege of reading her books and listening to her music a decade earlier than I otherwise might have. I struck lucky, and I struck lucky young.

We were living in that remote village near Kurunegala. Five kilometres from town and an hour away: twenty minutes on foot along a beaten-earth track, then cooling our heels at the bus stop, and finally the bus itself, which rarely got much above walking pace - when there was a bus at all. We had no electricity. We had a black-and-white television run off a car battery, which we were allowed to watch for about an hour a day, between eight and nine in the evening; that was prime time: the news and the evening serial. And we had a “radio-cassette recorder” - the name we gave those little black-and-silver boxes, with their tiny speakers set into the front, which seemed to us then the absolute pinnacle of technological sophistication.

I remember what came next very clearly, because its irony became a kind of private mythology. I did not first fall in love with Nanda Malini’s music over the airwaves - there was no FM then, only AM - nor through a cassette. It began with a booklet.

There had long been in our house a very old radio set, with ivory-coloured buttons picked out in glossy jet black. Like the keys of a piano, I would think years later, when I finally saw one. But when I was smaller still, that antique object had already been out of order for months, perhaps years. Time was elastic then; I have no way of measuring it now. For all that time, we were deprived of music. Then one day Father came home with a small National Panasonic "radio-cassette recorder" tucked under his arm.

For the household, its arrival was an epiphany. The precious equipment was immediately installed in the most eminent place in our drawing room, beside the television set, for a radio-cassette recorder ranks immediately below a television, does it not?

We had just one cassette to play on our precious "radio-cassette recorder", because the friend from whom Father had bought the second-hand machine had, by some stroke of luck, left one inside. A sort of bonus. I learnt later that he owned two copies of the same recording and had been only too happy to part with the spare. The cassette was labelled Yaathra. Its cover bore a beautiful photograph - very arty, I would say now in retrospect; more arty than artistic - of a woman dressed in white, seated in an oruwa, a yaathra, floating on water thick with lilies, in a scene that might have come straight out of Monet, delicately holding, though not actually playing, a zither. I remember catching sight, at the friend’s house, of an enormous poster bearing the same image.

My sister played it over and over, until one day the tape jammed in the machine; in trying to pull it free, we stripped out the magnetic ribbon and destroyed everything it held. It was not, however, the music on that cassette that first struck me.

There had also been a booklet with the radio. One might almost say that the machine was a kind of Nanda Malini Trojan horse - which gives some idea of how prominent she already was. She was only in her early forties, yet already, alongside W. D. Amaradeva, one of the foremost singers of her generation.

The booklet was entitled Hemanthayedi. It was an exquisitely produced collector’s piece: fine paper, meticulous printing, a title cut into the cover in beautiful calligraphy, the letters opening like tiny windows through the paper, and the songs laid out with equal elegance across the pages.

I pored over it endlessly.

For reasons I cannot quite explain, I fell in love with that little book. I learnt all the poems - all the songs, as I would later find out - by heart. And because I had never actually heard them sung, I invented melodies for them myself. Only later did I understand that the booklet was the official companion to another album by the famous singer whose cassette we had briefly possessed.

One anecdote in particular stays with me. I was playing a musical game with my cousins. Each of us had a fixed number of seconds - thirty, perhaps - to sing a song. When time ran out, we had to stop dead, even if that left us stranded in the middle of a line, or even a word. The next contestant then had five seconds or so to come up with another song beginning with the letter on which the previous singer had been cut off. At these family contests, I would triumphantly produce songs from my precious booklet, set to melodies of my own invention. Everyone would stare at me. What on earth were these strange songs the boy was muttering? Nobody recognised them - and naturally they recognised the tunes even less, since I had made those up myself. They declared them invalid. I protested that they were not. But I had no proof. I remember one aunt in particular becoming irritated when she heard me singing one of the texts, which mentioned virginity - the song, I believe, was Kumari Bambasara. From her reaction, you would have thought I had uttered an obscenity.

By now I had become a die-hard Nanda Malini fan. I had hardly listened to any of her songs, but I knew at least twelve of them by heart.

Then came Pawana. It was a musical whirlwind. By then, Nanda Malini had become far more uncompromising. The concert, which travelled across the island, was an act of resistance. She sang against injustice, racial hatred and class discrimination, and in the process saw some of her songs banned from public broadcast. Attending Pawana became almost an act of civic responsibility, and audiences emerged galvanised.

Ladies and gentlemen, honoured assembly,
do not let the beauty of my singing lull you.
Listen - and remain alert.
On those rickety chairs, amid the heat and sweat,
sit steadfast, unflinching.
For what I sing are not songs.
They are the cries of lament
of thousands of oppressed hearts.

I never managed to attend Pawana, even though Nanda Malini came several times to the Kurunegala Town Hall - our own ramshackle opera house, furnished with precisely those “rickety chairs” and ruled by that same “heat and sweat”.

But I did something else. I must have been about ten. At the time, we schoolchildren were given an allowance - actual money! - by the central government to cover the cost of lunch. The scheme had gone through various incarnations: at one point a bun, then a bowl of soup, and now cash. I, however, went to school every morning with a lunchbox prepared by Mother, so I never had to spend a rupee of my allowance. And, frankly, there was not much to spend it on in the pre-consumerist world of my childhood. No fancy phones, no earbuds or headphones, no games consoles. What could I possibly have bought from the pavement vendors of Kurunegala village-city? So I saved the money. And when it had grown into what seemed to me a small fortune - precisely sixty rupees - I bought myself the first thing I had ever paid for with money of my own: the two-cassette album of Pawana.

It was a beautiful object: two cassettes nestled inside a finely made paper box the size of a paperback, with a beautiful photograph of the singer sitting cross-legged in her perennial white attire, singing as though praying to invisible powers she was calling upon to protect our island, end its war and right its injustices. I would listen to my prized object the way a Western teenager listens to Nirvana. Full volume, screaming the words along with the performer, waving my arms, imploring the Buddha, the divinities, whatever power the incantation seemed to invoke.

I am no Walt Disney baby. I am no Jackson Five baby. I am no Nirvana baby, no Doors baby. I had access to none of those pre-globalisation idols. I am a Nanda Malini baby.

The first “paper” I ever wrote - I put the word in quotation marks because, at fifteen, I fully intended it in the loftiest academic sense - was also about Nanda Malini. By then I had left Kurunegala for Kandy and somehow managed to get into a fancy school for rich kids. Within my first few days there, I had the audacity to submit a piece to the school journal.

It was about Nanda Malini’s activism and about the new genre she had, to my adolescent mind, almost single-handedly established within Sinhala culture: wirodhaakalpa gee, “songs of resistance”. Today, I would probably count this particular body of her work among her weakest. At fifteen, however, I was intoxicated by those not terribly subtle lyrics and by the emphatic, unmistakably local rhythms that drove them.

One humiliation from that episode remains particularly vivid. I had misspelt - out of sheer ignorance, not through a slip of the pen - the very Sinhala term my “paper” was meant to defend and promote. My loyal friend Lohan Gunaweera discreetly suggested that perhaps I ought to use the correct word and, with exquisite tact, whispered it to me.

The article appeared in the school journal and immediately secured me a certain standing within the school community as a Nanda Malini expert. I am still sometimes considered one. I am not.

I did, however, once meet the Grande Dame of Sinhala song.

She came to our school, the same fancy rich-kids' school, set on a picturesque hill above the Kandy Lake, for a shoot. It was a new single, released by the Sri Lanka Rupavahini Corporation, on the virtues of being a good patriot or some equally edifying notion. She spent a whole afternoon and evening with us - the scene was to be filmed at night - while the crew set up the entire rigmarole such a superproduction requires and, as the uncontested Nanda Malini specialist, I was deputed to stay all of that time at her side. I was like a Delphic priestess suddenly admitted into the presence of Apollo. Or a fifteen-year-old Titanic fan catching sight of Leonardo DiCaprio on the red carpet.

Awestruck to tears, I was far more concerned with her physical comfort (Do you need water? What about tea? Are you hungry, Ma'am? A biscuit? A plantain? A bun? There are excellent buns down the hill, I can fetch you one…) than with discussing music with her. I remember telling her repeatedly how much I loved her - how much I loved her music and, above all, how much I loved her. My feelings were somewhat confused at that age.

Then, in a fit of adolescent devotion, I decided to give her something.

A friend of mine had carved a tiny statuette with his penknife that very day and, for some reason, had given it to me. It was a clenched fist, brandished. I prized it enormously and had owned it for only a few hours. And I gave it to her. I can still remember, almost word for word, the solemn little speech with which I presented it:

"I know how insignificant I am, and how insignificant this statuette is, but this is all I have, Ma'am. If you accept it, you will make me the happiest boy on earth. Please keep it."

I handed it over ceremoniously, with both hands. She accepted the "award." And, come to think of it, that raised fist might indeed have made a rather magnificent award if enlarged and cast in some precious metal.

Then we went down to the film set.

I was one of perhaps a hundred schoolchildren used as extras in a scene filmed with camera cranes. If that music video still exists somewhere, I must be in it.

From that day on, whenever I saw a photograph taken inside her home, the famous Music Ashramaya, I would instinctively scan the shelves for my tiny two-centimetre statuette among her many trophies, convinced that she had kept my gift in her cabinet. I never spotted it in any of them; the photographs were simply never sharp enough to reveal something so small.

A few months later, we invited her to our school and, during our annual literary festival, Kala Ulela, presented her with a lifetime achievement award. She was gracious enough to accept our invitation and came to Kandy for the second time that year. The idea of honouring her had been mine, and no one had objected to the choice of so prominent an artist. I also had the privilege of writing the citation that was read out as the chief guest presented her with the award. In 1998, I must have been the happiest citation-writer alive - even if the text itself, written in a state of pure awe, which I have been unable to reproduce here, was probably about as subtle as Nanda Malini’s protest songs at their most strident.

That day, I had to resist with all my might the temptation to ask what had become of my little statuette.

I still have not seen the Disney classics. I am still a Star Wars virgin. I cannot sing a single Michael Jackson line by heart. Perhaps that is as it should be. I was a Nanda Malini baby.

And today, I am an orphan.