The lost lyrics of Premakeerthi de Alwis ~ Malinda Words

Pic: www.roar.lk

On the 31st of July, 1989, a 42 year old man was dragged out of his house by a group of armed men. His bullet-ridden body was found some 100 m away from the house.

How many men born in the 1960s and early 1970s in the main and how many who were older suffered a similar fate? Sixty thousand is the estimate. Each had a name. Each had a history, a skill-set, a family, hopes and dreams. What if it were possible to gather those skills and those dreams? What if we could extrapolate to the ‘what might have been’? What if we add the 20,000 or so killed in 20,000 and the several hundreds of thousands killed in a thirty year war?

Let’s get back to the 31st of July, 1989. This was a time when there were around 50 killings on average. So he was not alone. No more, no less special as far as the sentiments of loved ones aggrieved are concerned. Still, I remembered him just the other day.

It happened during a casual conversation about the JVP with a stranger in a cafe (‘The Commons’). The stranger was trying to remember the name of an artist killed during that time, the bheeshanaya or, more accurately, the rathu-kola bheeshanaya.

Vijaya Kumaratunga? No, he said. Premakeerthi de Alwis? Yes, him.

‘How could they kill someone like that?’

Well, they could and they did. When a hard line is drawn, when you insist that if someone is not with you he/she must be against you, it’s easy. On a side note I observed the following:

‘It’s easy to say quit your job (as the JVP did), but in difficult times it would mean that the families of those who depend on a monthly salary would suffer great deprivations. The JVP with it’s chit-politics would not compensate. Premakeerthi was threatened. He was murdered.

Had he lived, he would be close to 75 today. He was an iconic lyricist, whose name is mostly unknown to many who loved the songs and the singers he wrote for; hundred of songs that delighted people then and delights people even today, including perhaps his killers, the leaders who ordered the killing and indeed the several hundred thousands who supported and still support that party.

Not one word of remorse though.

That needs to be said. What’s more important, I feel, is a thought that struck me during the aforementioned conversation: ‘How many more songs would Premakeerthi have written had his life not been cut short by hooligans who convinced themselves that they were fighting on behalf of the people?’

Even if he had slowed down (which is doubtful because all the top artists constantly troubled him for lyrics) we would have had the privilege of dozens if not hundreds of songs.

I trembled when that thought struck me. I’m trembling now as I write. I try to push aside the anger and it will go away, I know. I cannot shelve the grief.

Where are those lyrics? What happened to the imagination that translated into words and lines with fidelity to the need to forge rhythm that lends to melody and musical arrangement? Who stole all that? Where were they stashed away? Are they recoverable, ever?

In the long years that followed, new lyricists emerged. His contemporaries continued to write. There were songs. There was music. Music and art are never snuffed out by such gruesome crimes.

But a man named Samaraweera Mudalige Don Premakeerthi de Alwis, by all accounts a gentle and modest human being, is missing. A signature collection of the full corpus of Sinhala lyrics has been erased.

The lost lyrics. I don’t know what words in what arrangement made them. I don’t know their fragrance and flavour. They are raining down on me as I write. They fall upon heart-palms like finely crafted crystals. They stay. They hurt.

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is a new series. Links to previous articles in this new series are given below]

18 May 2023

The lost lyrics of Premakeerthi de Alwis

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