Overheard conversations rarely make good poems, but Balachandran V builds "A bit more time" almost entirely from one. Two friends talk about their mothers the way people talk about the weather. One is eighty and "still hale and hearty." The other is eighty too, "OK, / Though a bit slow in walking." Nothing here is remarkable, and that is the point. For these men a living mother is such an ordinary fact that she comes with a dinner appointment ("Got to go home for dinner with her") and a mild complaint about her pace. The speaker, listening, has neither the appointment nor the complaint.
The poem turns on its smallest sentence: "Men of my age. Silent, I calculate." The clipped fragment sets him apart from the easy chatter, and the verb "calculate" is cold, almost clerical. Grief has become sums. The answer, "She'd be eighty three," is a conditional, a number that belongs to a life that didn't happen. Arithmetic is the only way he can join the conversation, and he does it without saying a word.
What follows is a kind of childlike bargaining. He wishes his mother had "married younger" and that he had been "born first," as though the calendar could be rearranged after the fact. Look at how modest the request is: "at the most, / A bit more time with her." He isn't asking for her to live forever, only for scraps. The hedges "at the most" and "a bit" shrink the wish, and the shrinking makes it heavier, because it sounds like someone who has already learned how little he is allowed to ask. The title's phrase arrives at the end of a line, almost as an afterthought, which is how such wishes tend to surface.
The emotional centre is the quartet of lines that follows: "Now that she's gone / I wish she weren't / Though there were times when alive / I had wished she weren't." The same words appear twice with different weight. The first "weren't" is easy to finish in the mind (gone), but the second hangs without an object. Did he wish her absent, or less present, or simply different? The poem won't say. The shift from "wish" to the past perfect "had wished" pushes the old feeling into the distance, yet the echo ties the two moments together, so he can't pretend the earlier wish belonged to someone else. This is grief mixed with guilt, the part people rarely admit aloud.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and lines of uneven length that follow the pace of speech. Contractions like "she'd" and "could've" keep it conversational. Imagery is almost absent. There are no metaphors and no landscape, only a dinner and a slow walk, and these small domestic details do the work. A mother who walks slowly is exactly what the speaker would gladly have, which makes the friend's complaint quietly painful.
The ending steps back from "I" to "you." The only exclamation mark in the poem comes with "How foolish, how regrettably foolish / Not to love, not to be with / The ones who care for you most!" Some readers may find this moral too explicit after so much restraint. But the formal, slightly stiff "regrettably" sounds like a verdict a man passes on himself, and the pairing "to love" and "to be with" echoes the "time with her" he longed for earlier. Love, the poem suggests, is not only a feeling but a matter of showing up.
The poem is signed with a place and date, Trivandrum, 12-01-2010, which gives it the feel of a note jotted down while the thought was fresh. That is an impression, not a known fact, but it suits the poem's unpolished honesty. Its significance lies in how much it makes from so little: two casual remarks, one subtraction, and one uncomfortable confession. It shows that grief often arrives not at funerals but in ordinary moments, when other people's lives reveal what is missing from one's own.