Passing a driving test is usually a teenager's milestone, which is exactly why the speaker of Balachandran V's poem feels out of place. At forty-eight, "grey haired, bald and a paunch to boot," he stands "amidst youth" waiting to steer a car through an H marked out by iron rods. The poem starts as a small, self-mocking confession, but by the end the test track has widened into a whole life. Its real subject is not the licence he has just earned but the driving he has been doing, licence or not, for decades.
The first half reads almost like a manual. "Forward in first, backward in reverse, / Turn a right and then a left, do it twice for an H." The lines are short and practical, and their paired opposites (forward and backward, right and left) mimic the back-and-forth of the manoeuvre. Then the car begins to take on human qualities. The clutch has a "release" that the speaker "senses," the throttle has an "urge to move," and the gears exist "to change my pace." The vocabulary of the machine is already leaning toward the vocabulary of a life. The image of a baby taking its first steps is comic beside the bald, paunchy driver, but it is also tender. It admits that being a beginner is not something we outgrow.
The middle of the poem turns on a piece of wordplay: "Aged middle, I drove on the left." Flipping "middle-aged" slides the word into the position of the car on the road, and the next line, "Off the middle, slightly to left," makes that position a temperament. This is a man who avoids the centre without chasing extremes: "never to the ridges, just a bit to port." Port is a sailor's word, and it quietly turns the car into a small ship. Then "Ladies and gents" arrives, and the speaker turns to face us like a performer or a man confiding in a crowd. Left also plays against "right" in the second line, where he "gained the right to drive." The right is a permission granted by an examiner. The left is a personal habit. The pun in "Right or wrong, I went the way" pushes this further: the test may license him, but "my conscience drew the map."
The final third looks back over "forty-eight years, jerking and moving," a phrase that fits both a learner's stalling car and a life's lurches. "Turning wildly, off on a tangent" is a sharp image. A tangent touches a curve at a single point and then flies away, which suits someone who brushed against convention while heading elsewhere. The speaker's faults are shrunk by small measures, "reckless a bit, casual a mite," in a tone halfway between honesty and excuse.
Twice, a line ends on a dangling "but-," as if the speaker pauses before shifting gear. Both times what follows is a gain. First comes "Never did I lose the drive to live," where "drive" means both motivation and the act of driving, so the poem's two meanings finally lock together. Then, after a list of hazards with no verbs ("potholes, mud, rain and sleet," "curves, blocks"), as though the road were simply throwing things at him, comes "Thank God, not reached a dead end yet." The little word "yet" admits mortality, and the clipped grammar, which drops the "I have," sounds too modest to claim victory.
The form supports this modesty. The poem is a single unbroken block of twenty-eight lines with no rhyme and no regular metre, and its rhythm is that of someone talking. Slightly off-standard phrasing like "Turn a right" and "not reached" adds to the plain, spoken voice. A polished rhyme scheme would make the speaker sound more sure of himself than he is, and the unbroken block feels like a road with no lay-bys.
The poem matters because it takes an ordinary, even faintly embarrassing event and finds dignity in it. It suggests that official permission and lived competence are different things, and that a late start does not cancel the miles already travelled. It also shows how a sustained metaphor can be built from everyday objects without strain, and how humour and humility can carry a serious idea.