Nothing dramatic happens in Balachandran V's "Monsoon Depression", and that is why it works. A man sits awake during a night of heavy rain, and the poem follows his senses until they lead him somewhere he did not plan to go: his own funeral. The title does double duty. A monsoon depression is a weather system, but the word also names a mood, and the poem lets the two seep into each other until the leaking roof and the clouded mind are hard to tell apart.
The opening is built almost entirely from sound. Rain is "drumming" on the tin roof, dried branches fall like "crashing cymbals", and a coconut lands with a "shattering boom" like a cannon ball. The images swing between orchestra and battlefield, so an ordinary storm feels both musical and violent. Then the noise thins out into frogs and "patter", and the stanza ends on "the sour, sullen silences of the night". The hissing s-sounds hush the line, and silence is given a mood of its own.
The first two stanzas are really one long sentence of participles, "listening" and "looking", with no main verb to settle on. The speaker is suspended, "mind empty of thoughts", and the grammar copies that state: nothing is done, only noticed. As the poem moves from listening to looking, the focus narrows from the whole night to a single room. Water drips through "cracked tiles" and a puddle moves "slowly like a serpent across the floor". After the loud cannon ball, this simile is quiet and a little sinister. The house is imperfect and exposed, and something is creeping in.
What comes next is the warmest moment in the poem. Sancho and Sally sleep "close together, on the torn piece of an old quilt", which was "a friend's wedding gift many years ago…". The trailing ellipsis lets the years pass without comment. A gift made for a celebration has become a worn bed for sleeping dogs. The line contrasts the animals' closeness with the speaker's wakeful solitude. The parents arrive just after: "My parents, no more now / Come with the chilling winds that blow." The loss is stated flatly, and weather does the work of memory. The speaker is "thinking about nothing / In particular", yet grief walks in anyway.
From there the poem turns to the imagined funeral. "I imagine myself dead" is delivered without fuss, and the scene is observed with a dry eye. Some mourners are silent, some are "socializing", and some are "looking important, giving directions". It is a gentle irony about how rituals of death can turn into occasions for performance. Then the lamps and incense give way to the dogs: "inexpressible would be their grief, / Quite likely shut in my room, away from people." The practical, almost shrugging "Quite likely" makes the image hurt more. The dogs cannot be told what has happened or join the mourning, and they are left alone with it.
The last stanza states the idea outright. The interjected "I rue" works like a sigh, and the argument turns on the word "pain". First it means suffering, as in "the pain of having to leave", and then it becomes something one can hand on: "the pain you leave". Pain here is an inheritance, and what the dead bequeath is "sorrow, only sorrow, to the deprived". The repetition offers no consolation. Death is judged by what it does to the living, not by what it does to the one who dies.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The lines are uneven, and dashes and ellipses mimic a mind drifting. The long, sprawling opening gives way to short, tight lines at the end, as though thought were condensing into a conclusion. The poem also moves from the concrete to the abstract. For most of its length it shows, through tin roof, quilt and puddle, and only at the end does it say what it means. Some readers may find that last statement more direct than what came before, but the dogs have already made the case, so it feels earned.
The poem's quiet strength lies in its unselfish turn. A man alone with a rainy night might be expected to dwell on his own mortality. Instead he imagines the faces of others and the grief of two sleeping animals. The place and date printed beneath the title, Trivandrum, 02.06.2011, make the poem read like a record of one real night. It leaves the reader thinking about the sorrow we will one day leave in other people's lives.