Mathara is the Shreya Ghoshal ballad from the Khalifa soundtrack, and it is built on restraint rather than scale. Jakes Bejoy keeps the arrangement close and unhurried — the "vibing baseline" listeners keep mentioning is doing most of the structural work, letting the vocal sit forward and unforced rather than climbing toward a big finish. The song's subject is longing that has settled rather than longing that hurts. It is not the sound of a breakup; it is the sound of someone who cannot put a person down and has stopped trying to. That is why the melody circles instead of resolving — the emotion it describes has no ending either. Shreya Ghoshal's reunion with Jakes Bejoy is part of why the track carried beyond the film. Her Malayalam work is a distinct strand of her catalogue, and Mathara sits in the register she is most identified with there: melodic, technically controlled, and delivered as if underplayed. For listeners searching the English meaning, the song is a love song of the quieter kind — devotion described from inside, addressed to someone who is absent from the room but not from the singer's attention.