Nobody writes odes to mosquitoes, and Balachandran V doesn't quite write one either. What he gives us is a sweaty, sleepless midnight in which a tiny insect is blown up into something close to a medical emergency, and then a closing question the poem leaves unanswered.
The situation is simple. The speaker lies under a fan, is bitten, wakes, hunts the room, kills a couple of mosquitoes, sits naked on the floor, watches another one feed, and wonders. The poem is dated 02.03.2012 and names Alappuzha, and the hot air that "refuses to leave my room" suits a humid night, though the poem itself never looks beyond the four walls. Its shape mirrors the mood. The stanzas run three, seven, six and four lines, so the action swells in the middle and then shrinks to a mutter at the end.
There is no rhyme and no steady metre. The lines sprawl, much like a restless sleeper. Enjambment does some neat work: the speaker scans the room "and hit / At one or two", and the line break makes the swat fall short, just as it does for a half-awake person. Repetition does the rest. "I could feel it, I could feel it" stutters, as if the sensation is looping in the speaker's head. The grammar wobbles in places ("a ceiling fan that pummel me"), which gives the poem a slightly unpolished, midnight feel, though a careful reader will notice it. The sound is also worth hearing. The second stanza fills up with s-sounds ("switching", "scan", "satisfaction", "smear"), and by the end "sitting", "scratching", "sullenly" and "species" keep the hiss going, like the whine of the insects themselves.
The imagery plays with scale. The fan doesn't cool the speaker; it "pummels", as though even the furniture has joined the attack. Killing two mosquitoes brings "immense satisfaction", a mock-heroic phrase that makes the speaker both funny and a little pitiful. The victory is also stained: the crushed insects leave "a smear of my blood on the polished tiles". The speaker has not defeated the enemy so much as spilled their own blood a second time.
The third stanza changes the tone. Until now the mosquitoes were plural "bloodsuckers"; now there is one, and she has a gender. The speaker imagines "her stomach billowing with my blood", a word that makes her sound like a sail filling with wind. The bite is rendered in two registers. The scientific "proboscis" sits beside the plain, brutal "needle", and then the pain is compared to "the catheter of angiogram shooting up through my nerves / And into my brain." It is an extravagant comparison, and it works because it is so out of proportion. The poem doesn't say why a hospital procedure comes to mind, and we shouldn't guess. What the simile does convey is violation: something sharp has gone in, and the speaker, sitting cross-legged and unclothed, has no defences. That vulnerability is both comic and uncomfortably real.
The last stanza deflates everything. The adverbs "morosely" and "sullenly" show someone sulking over a "risen little bump", and then comes the quiet, flat question: "Why only the female of the species suck blood." The title seems to echo a familiar phrase from Kipling's poem about the female being deadlier than the male, though that is my inference, since the poem does not say so. There is also a factual answer to the speaker's question: female mosquitoes need the proteins in blood to develop their eggs. The poem doesn't supply it. Its interest lies in the speaker's mood, not in the explanation.
That is where its appeal and its ambiguity sit. A reader can take the final line as pure curiosity from a tired, itchy man. Another reader might catch a faint joke about gender, since "female" is the one word the poem has been quietly building toward. The text commits to neither. What it does well is capture a familiar moment, an ordinary irritation that swells at night until it feels enormous, and then show anger turning into puzzlement. It is a small poem, but it is honest about how petty and how dramatic a mosquito bite can feel at midnight.