We are usually told to treasure time and let no hour slip away. In "In Exile," Balachandran V turns that advice upside down. His speaker is far from home, and every week that vanishes counts as a small victory. The poem carries a place and date, Alleppey, 11.05.2012, but it never explains what keeps the speaker away. That silence works in its favour. Without a cause to point to, we are left with the feeling itself, which is the real subject.
The first stanza begins with a confession of how narrow life has become: "Since now Time matters to me / Only as weekends that I can go home." The capital T gives Time a weight it no longer has for the speaker. It has shrunk from a grand abstraction into a row of Saturdays and Sundays, and everything between them is just waiting. The phrase "To console myself" is the plainest admission in the poem. Counting is not a hobby or a plan. It is a comfort, something the speaker does to get through the days.
The central trick is in the phrase "count the weeks backward." Normally we count forward, toward a birthday or a holiday. Here the speaker counts back, like someone scratching marks on a wall, and the next line explains why: he is "Not looking forward to the future I have to spend here." The idiom is turned on its head. "Looking forward" usually means eager anticipation, but the future here offers nothing to anticipate, only more time "here," a place the poem never even names. The speaker's eyes are fixed on what is behind him because only the past feels like progress.
The second stanza begins with a single word of correction: "But backward." It repeats the earlier idea and sharpens it. Then comes the poem's quiet paradox: "As yet another week slips past / As one less / In exile." Normally "slips past" carries regret, the sense of life leaking away. Here the slipping is welcomed, because every lost week becomes "one less." The poem leaves you to feel how sad that is. To wish time away is to wish away a piece of your own life, and the speaker does it knowingly, because the present is too hard to hold.
The form supports this. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, only plain speech broken into short lines, as if the speaker were thinking aloud. The lines get shorter as the poem goes on. The long fourth line, "Not looking forward to the future I have to spend here," stretches out like the empty future it describes. In the second stanza the lines shrink to "As one less," just three words, then to "In exile." The effect is of time being ticked off in smaller and smaller units. Both stanzas end on "exile," and the dash after "In exile-" in the first stanza leaves the word hanging, like a pause before saying something painful. The repeated "As" at the start of two lines adds a slow, dripping rhythm, and the soft sounds of "weekends," "weeks" and "week" keep the idea of counting audible throughout.
Notice, too, what disappears. "Home" appears once, early on, and then never returns. By the end the only thing left in the poem's last line is exile itself. The consolation the speaker reaches for, subtraction, never brings him home within the poem. It only makes the distance a little shorter on paper.
"Exile" is a heavy word, usually linked to banishment, and the poem does not say whether the speaker's situation is that extreme. Judging by the text, though, it is the speaker's feeling that matters. The poem is significant because it takes a very modern kind of homesickness, the kind that comes from being away for work or duty, and makes it feel as serious as any historical separation. In nine short lines it shows how longing can warp our relationship with time, so that the most natural human wish is not to live more but to get through faster.