Most of us know the feeling of sitting in one place while the mind is somewhere else entirely. Balachandran V's "Himalaya by Proxy" (dated Trivandrum, 6 June 2011) turns that feeling into a small, quietly funny portrait of a office worker who lives in the mountains only by substitution. The title says it: a proxy is someone or something that stands in for the real thing, and every image in the poem is a stand-in.
The first stanza is a list of the places where the Himalaya has been smuggled into the workday. Three lines begin with "In": the "air-conditioned chill of the office," the "desktop picture of Mount Everest," the "passwords like Ganga, Yamuna." The repetition feels like a catalogue of small consolations. The first is the funniest. Machine-made cold stands in for mountain cold, and the word "chill" has been cheaply manufactured. The passwords are subtler. Ganga, Yamuna, Badri, Kailas and Manasarovar are the names of rivers, pilgrimage sites and a sacred lake, and here they are typed in daily as login codes. Sacred geography has shrunk to something hidden and routine. Yet the choice also suggests longing, since the speaker has to name these places every time he starts work. The list lengthens as it goes, ending on the sprawling "Manasarovar," and the dash that follows leaves the sentence hanging.
The second stanza picks up that suspended grammar. We wait through "Leafing," "Dreaming," and a pile of phrases before the main verb finally arrives: "I imagine." The delay mimics daydreaming, which never goes straight to its point. "Surreptitiously" is a telling word, because it makes the speaker a furtive schoolboy hiding a book from a teacher. The break after "meandering through" lets the line wander onto the next one, as a stream or path would, and "Rhododendrons and snow bound paths" supplies the only lush, physical scenery in the poem. Then comes the most touching image: "the sips of water from my bottle / To be that of the streams in the mountains." It is a modest act of make-believe. A bottle on a desk has to do the work of a glacier-fed stream, and the humility of that gesture is both comic and a little sad.
The final stanza changes tone. "It is really so easy; all I have to do / Is to get up from my seat" is flat, practical and almost instructional. The speaker lists simple actions in order: get up, leave the "complaining customer," walk to the window "at the rear of the office," look up. The customer appears only as a complaint, a voice reduced to one adjective, which shows how little room the job leaves for anything else. The window is at the rear, an out-of-the-way corner, as though the possibility of escape has been kept at the back of the speaker's life.
The ending is open to more than one reading. The speaker says it is "so easy," but the whole poem has shown that it is not, since he has been proxy-trekking for who knows how long. The easiness might be sincere, a sudden clear-sighted realisation. It might equally be ironic, the sort of thing one tells oneself while staying in the chair. The closing ellipsis after "skies…" refuses to settle it. Notice too that he looks up at "the skies," not at mountains. The window offers no Himalaya, only the open space above, and perhaps that is enough to remind him that there is something bigger than the office.
Formally the poem is free verse, with no rhyme and no regular metre. Line lengths shift with the thought, and the plain, conversational diction keeps the poem close to speech. The musical moments are saved for the place names, whose soft, rolling sounds stand out against the office vocabulary of "desktop," "passwords," and "customer."
The poem matters because it takes an ordinary, widely shared frustration and treats it gently rather than melodramatically. There is no rant against work and no grand escape, only a sip of water and a glance at the sky. It suggests that the habit of keeping a wish alive in small, disguised ways is both a comfort and a quiet warning.