Onam is meant to be the loud part of the year, and Balachandran V's poem opens by cataloguing that noise: bright dresses, televisions and fridges, cars and bikes bought in a "spending spree." The speaker calls it a "respite from a life, lived mundane," a tired, flat phrase that already hints at his distance from the celebration. The next stanza then strips the festival down to one fact: "Onam, my first, without my mother." The header gives the place and date as Trivandrum, 28.08.04, and the poem reads like something written while the loss was still fresh.
The first half of the poem is about time. "Forty-six Onams I spent with her" turns a life into a count of festivals. Then comes the stark line "Onam will come, the dead will not." Two footnote markers, on the rice and on the crow, point to notes that are not included here, so those lines stay partly closed to us. Judging by the imagery, though, the final line of that stanza ("Her last was a ball for the crow to eat") suggests a death ritual, and it compresses a whole life into one small offering of food. Against that, the speaker sets the natural world: "trees do flower, waters do rise, / Hills turn green, despite the droughts." The consolation is real but thin. "They mightn't be the same, yet they are" admits that renewal is a kind of approximation, and that admission leads into the poem's central fantasy.
That fantasy is that the mother might return in "a newborn" somewhere, and that "somewhere, somehow, we would meet." The imagined reunion is physical rather than philosophical. He would hold her hand, touch her head, and press her cheek to his. He would "sense her soul from the smell of her skin," and that smell becomes "the smell, the feel, of my mother's milk." Recognition comes through the body, the way a baby first knows a parent. The repeated "I'd" and the echoing "Hold her hand... Hold her cheek" make these stanzas feel like a rehearsal he has run through many times.
What lifts the poem above ordinary elegy is the guilt in its second half. The speaker admits to "Love, neither shown, never given," and to words that were "so sweet" in his imagined future but "Bitter" in the past "unto the last." The wall image is the sharpest: "walls did grow, watered with hate." The verb belongs to gardening, the same world as the flowering trees a few stanzas earlier. Nature grows things worth having, but in the household the thing that grew was a wall. He claims he "cared for her with all my heart" and "took care unto her last," yet he also confesses he never knew "the touch of her heart." Duty and tenderness are shown as separate things.
The horse "whipped, without reason" and the dog "kicked, howling in pain" are the poem's hardest images. The poem doesn't say whom they stand for. They may picture the mother's bewilderment at his harshness, or his own sense of being hurt, or both. The words "Whimpering in fear, uncomprehending" leave the guilt unresolved, and the sentence still ends with "Yet I took care," as if care were being offered in his defence and he doesn't quite trust it.
The poem is built loosely. It is mostly unrhymed quatrains in short lines of plain, conversational speech, with little ornament. That plainness suits a speaker who admits he was bad at saying things. The pattern breaks at the end, when the final stanza stretches to five lines and the voice cries out: "Ah! Time! Come to a grinding halt, / Shift a lever in reverse mode." The mechanical image of a lever is almost comic, and its clumsiness makes the wish more believable. The last request is for a single remembered day, sitting on her lap, a kiss, a hug, and sleep "as I did, once, in her womb." Time runs backward from lap to womb, so the poem ends where life began.
The poem matters because it refuses a comfortable grief. It lets the festival, the seasons and the hope of rebirth all fail to console him, and it keeps the unlovely truth that a person can care for a parent and still fail to love her aloud. That honesty is what stays with the reader.