A man returns to Cochin and finds it no longer matches his memory. He walks the streets, retracing his own footprints, and the repeated "walking" and "remembering" make the poem feel like slow, deliberate steps into the past. He recalls an open window, a shut door, light through leaves. But the room, the hotel, the shops and the shy-smiling girls are gone, and garbage lies where geese once honked.
What he feels is a quiet grief mixed with disorientation. He is a stranger among rushing faces, and he even doubts that he ever lived here. The stump where a shade once stood becomes a small, sharp image of loss. He then widens his thoughts: monuments, he suggests, leave only a fading name or a battered statue. The ending moves to the shore, with a wave and a gull's cry. The mood turns calmer, almost resigned. The tenderness he hears and feels belongs to him alone, a private memory that no one else can share.