Balachandran V's "In Another Country" begins by simply putting one foot in front of another. Four lines open with "Walking", and the fourth ends by sliding into "remembering", so the stroll through Cochin becomes a trip through time almost before we notice. "Walking over my footprints" is the sharpest image of the opening: the speaker treads on the traces of his younger self, as if the pavement were a page he had already written on. Four lines beginning "Remembering" follow, then three beginning "Gone-". The poem moves from body to mind to loss, and its repeated openings do the work that a rhyme scheme might do in a more formal piece.
The remembered Cochin is built from light and sound. There are "lights bright and empty streets", "an open window, a shut door", and "light filtering thru leaves". The pairings are telling. Brightness sits beside emptiness, and openness beside closure, so this youth is not remembered as simply golden. Judging by these images, it was also a time of waiting and missed chances. The present town is drawn in blunt contrast: "Garbage piled up where geese once honked." The line changes tense halfway through, and the honking survives only as a missing noise. The list of vanished things then slips from "shops with fruits and cakes" to "girls with shy smiles and love". Things you could buy and people you could love sit in the same grammatical row, as though loss made no distinction between them. The dash after each "Gone-" reads like a catch of breath.
Then comes estrangement. "A stranger to faces rushing by / Strange indeed, the memories bidding bye." The echo of "stranger" and "strange" is obvious, but the chime of "by" and "bye" is subtler. It makes the hurrying crowd and the departing memories one motion. The title now makes sense: the street has not moved, yet the speaker has been carried into "another country" without leaving it. His questions follow. "Did I ever live here, doeth my breath linger here?" The archaic "doeth" sits oddly beside the casual "thru" of earlier lines. It may be a slip, or it may be the speaker reaching for solemn language when ordinary words fail. Both questions end on "here", as if he were stamping the ground to test whether it remembers him. The answer is a stump. The "light filtering thru leaves" has lost its tree, and the shade he asks about is gone.
"Nothing remains" is the poem's shortest line, and it works as its hinge. The next line is a paradox: "Nothing to remind, nothing to forget." With no landmarks left to prompt memory, the past can no longer be summoned by place, but it cannot be shaken off either. The speaker then turns on "Monuments!" with an exclamation that is half scorn, half grief. They leave only "a fading name or a bludgeoned statue". "Bludgeoned" is a violent word for something made of stone. It suggests memorials not just worn down by time but beaten, though the poem gives no context for this, so it is best read as a general image of how fragile public remembrance is.
The final four lines move to the shore. Cochin is a coastal city, so the sea is a natural setting, and the speaker stands "in the shores of time" with only "the lap of a wave, the cry of a Gull". The noisy streets give way to a few natural sounds. The last two lines are tightly parallel: "A caress- gentle and kind, only I will feel / A whisper- of love, only I will hear." The tenderness is real, but so is the isolation. Everything the town has lost survives in one person, and the repeated "only I" admits that it will go when he does.
The poem is not technically intricate. It is free verse with no regular metre or end-rhyme, and a few of its choices, like the exclamations and "doeth", risk sounding overstated. Its force lies in its argument, which is that statues and street corners cannot hold what mattered to us. Memory lives in the person who walks the streets, and that makes it both the only monument that lasts and the most fragile one.