Sunday, in Balachandran V's poem, begins as a small declaration of independence: a day when you answer to nobody, read even "the most insignificant ad," and brush your teeth "only when you want to eat." The joke is gentle, but it sets a trap. Given a day to do exactly what he wishes, the speaker picks up a duster, and by the end of the afternoon the chore has become a reckoning with his own death. The central idea is that the objects we keep mean something only because of the people who remember them, and that memory, like the shelf, needs someone alive to tend it.
The poem moves along the shelf as the speaker does. The early stanzas are light and domestic: "soft synthetic bristles," an "old torn shirt." Then the fourth stanza darkens: "A fleck of dust, a blotch of stain, / A crack that weren't there before." These are a cleaner's observations, but they also read as a list of small damages that time adds without asking. The fifth stanza is the longest, eight lines instead of four, as if the souvenirs have overflowed the poem's usual shape. A fan from China, a father's medal "for service with merit," vases that were "my mom's valued prizes," a granny's fruit bowl: each object comes with a person attached, so the shelf becomes a family tree in glass and porcelain. Yet the list loosens at its tail. After the "headless dolls" (a faintly eerie detail from childhood play), it ends with "Statuettes of dogs and such other stuff." That phrase is the speaker's own shrug, and it prepares his bleak question about what these "worthless pieces" would mean to his wife or son. The careful inventory has already argued against the word "worthless." He can name every piece and who gave it. His sadness is that no one else can.
The sound of the poem supports this. It is free verse with no fixed metre, and its lines have the slightly rambling rhythm of someone talking to himself while he works. Rhyme is mostly absent, with only faint echoes: "do" closes two lines in the first stanza, and "read/ad" and "teeth/eat" chime loosely in the second. Only in the last stanza does rhyme close in: "away," "away," "grey," "day," "away." The poem reaches for sound-pattern just as the speaker's life reaches its vanishing point, and the repeated "away" works like a door swinging slowly shut. The short line "Then one day-" is a held breath before the final drop.
The imagery turns on a reversal. In the third stanza the speaker wields the duster against dust. By the seventh, dust has become the agent: "Specks of dust would settle and stain." Dust sheets are what cover furniture in a closed-up house, and "shroud" makes the comparison to a burial cloth explicit. The refrain "when I am gone," used twice, keeps pressing the same thought. The fading photograph, where "colours give way to meaningless grey," is the bleakest image, because what is lost is not just the picture but its meaning. The last line also echoes the opening. The "old torn shirt" he uses for wiping returns as "Torn or crushed and swept away," so the tool of cleaning becomes the fate of the cleaner. Even the verbs "swipe" and "swept" sit at the two ends of the poem, like a pair of bookends.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal to console. It offers no heirloom-as-legacy comfort and no promise that the family will treasure the fan or the medal. A dull Sunday task opens onto the fear that a life's small, particular meanings will not survive translation to the next generation. The question "what value they have" is left unanswered, but the tenderness of the cataloguing hints at an answer: the value lies in the act of remembering, which is exactly what the speaker is doing as he cleans. For a reader, the poem is a prompt to look at the clutter in their own home and ask whose stories it is quietly holding.