Bite-Size Burmese: Droplets of Destiny and Romance Written on the Forehead

Destiny comes in many shapes and forms, but in Burmese, figuratively speaking, it comes as water droplets, or ရေစက်။ People became friends, neighbors, or lovers because they share some droplets of fate (ရေစက်ဆုံလို့၊ ရေစက်ရှိလို့), as a result of some acts of merit they had done in past lives. By the same token, when the supply of fate or merit runs out (ရေစက်ကုန်ပြီ), it's time to part ways, never to meet again.

Your romantic fate, on the other hand, comes as words scribbled on your forehead (နဖူးစာ/ဖူးစာ). Hence, the name ဖူးစာရေးနတ်, or the God who Scribbles on the Forehead. In this episode of Bite-Size Burmese, learn to talk about the droplets of fate that you'd brought with you from the previous life to this, and your spouse-to-be with a mark inscribed on his or her forehead.

Burmese song cited, ရှေးရေစက်, performed by Win Oo and Mar Mar Aye. Intro and end music: "When my ukulele plays" by Soundroll, Upbeat.io.

Vocabulary

အလွမ်းပြေ a nostalgic act

နားဆင်တယ် to listen 

ရေစက် acts of merit that bring people together in another life

ရေစက်ရှိတယ် to have cause to come together, to be fated to meet

တူနှစ်သွယ်ဆုံစည်းရတယ် two strands happen to merge / the two of us happen to meet

မှန်းဆတယ် to guess

ကံဆုံတယ် to have compatible karma, to be fated to meet

ရေစက်ကုန်ပြီ to run out of the fate to meet or be together

ကံကုန်ပြီ to exhaust one’s supply of karma, to die

နဖူးစာ/ဖူးစာ romantic destiny (literally, words written on the forehead)

နဖူးစာရေးနတ် / ဖူးစာရေးနတ် the god of love / the god who scribbles on the forehead

ဖူးစာရှင် the romantic partner chosen by fate or destiny

ကြင်ဖေါ် spouse, partner

ဘယ်လိုသဘောရလဲ။ What do you think?