Nobody expects a snapshot to turn into a crisis of identity, but that is what happens in Balachandran V's "Caught Behind". A man sees a photograph taken from behind, and the head in it belongs to a stranger. The poem, dated Trivandrum, 26 August 2011, follows his refusal to accept that the stranger is himself. Its central idea is that we live inside a self-image built almost entirely from the front, from mirrors and familiar faces, so the self other people see is partly hidden from us. The poem ends by admitting this is a view of himself that he "will never see / With my own eyes."
The construction is cleverly reluctant. Most of the poem is a single sentence, and its main point is held back for as long as possible. The speaker says he looks "aghast", refuses "to believe, to accept", and then the sentence stretches through the description of the head: the "unfamiliar posterior", the "dirty grey wisps of hair", the "odd-looking horseshoe", the scalp reflecting the flash. Only after all this does the short, blunt line arrive: "Is really me". The long delay mimics the mind's stalling, as if he cannot bring himself to finish the thought until he has described every unflattering detail. The word "really" sounds like a last protest. The pairing "believe, to accept" also matters, because believing is a matter of evidence while accepting is a matter of feeling, and the speaker is struggling with both.
The poem's humour comes from a clash of vocabularies. "Posterior" and "anterior" are clinical, Latinate words, the language of an anatomy lesson, and the speaker uses them to hold his own head at arm's length like a specimen. Against them stand homely, slightly scruffy images: "wisps", "dirty grey", and above all the "horseshoe / Stuck on a hairless scalp". The horseshoe is a sharp comparison, since it captures the curved fringe of hair around a bald crown, and "stuck on" makes the hair seem fixed to the head by accident, like an object that does not belong there. "Posterior" also quietly means "backside" in everyday speech, so the formal word carries a small joke. The flash bouncing off the scalp is the cruelest detail, because the camera exposes him in the literal sense of the word.
The title plays on this too. "Caught" suggests being caught out, as in caught in the act. "Caught behind" also describes the photograph exactly, since he is caught from behind. Readers who know cricket will hear another echo, because "caught behind" is how a batsman can be dismissed. Whether or not the poet meant it, the idea of being suddenly and publicly out suits the speaker's embarrassment.
The sound of the poem is conversational. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, and the lines vary from the clipped "I look aghast" to the longer, trailing descriptive lines. This looseness suits a speaker who sounds like he is telling a friend an anecdote. A few "h" sounds run through the description ("hair", "horseshoe", "hairless", "head", "human") and give it a faint sigh of resignation. "Every time" suggests that this is not a single shock but a repeated one, and that he never gets used to it.
The ending turns the poem. A dash, a gap, and then two lines carry the comedy into something more thoughtful. The "anterior" is the face he has known "all my life", yet the sentence says the real person is "hiding behind" it, which reverses our usual sense of who is hidden. The word "thought" in "I thought I knew" quietly undermines his confidence, and the closing ellipsis leaves the idea unfinished. Judging by the grey and the baldness, the poem may also be about ageing, but the speaker never says so directly.
The poem is significant because it takes a small, slightly silly moment and finds in it a truth that applies to everyone. We cannot see our own backs, and so we rely on cameras and other people to complete the picture. The poem asks us to laugh at the speaker first and then to realise we are in the same position.