A hospital couch, a cold gel, a young woman leaning over a patient: Balachandran V's "Echo" (dated Trivandrum, 5 July 2012) starts in nearly the least romantic setting imaginable and turns it into a small comedy of longing. The title does double work. The sensor, the screen and the pounding heart suggest an echocardiogram, a scan that bounces sound off the heart. But "echo" soon means something wider: the way an older body still answers to feelings from decades ago.
The situation is simple. The speaker lies half-undressed, waiting, and what he notices is not the machine but the woman: her perfume, "the warmth, the softness of her arm across my chest." He imagines her breast pressed against his back and lets himself be openly ridiculous, an "excited adolescent" giggling "inside," picturing the girl "taking a fancy / To my broad, hairy, muscled chest." Judging by the details, her arm is simply positioned for the examination, so the romance exists only in his head. What makes the poem likeable is that he knows it. "I smiled at myself, my silliness, my innocence": the three-part list is affectionate, not ashamed, and he is glad that imagination can still "rouse" him.
The poem's best effect is the counterpoint between two conversations. Her voice is soft but strictly professional, asking about blood pressure, cholesterol and "the pains." Her only quoted words are flat reassurance: "Nothing much wrong here... take the medicines." Meanwhile his mind drifts to "the back of her beautiful neck" and the wish to "breathe her in, deep." The two never meet. There is a quiet irony in the word "muscled" as well. The chest he fantasises about as strong becomes, a few lines later, the site of "Thickening walls, weakening muscles."
The form is free verse, with no rhyme and no fixed metre. The lines are plain and conversational, and the stanzas change length with the speaker's thoughts: a long opening drift, then short two-line bursts of medical verdict. Light punctuation and enjambment ("Waiting for the cold creamed sensor / Feeling my heart…") give the sense of a man lying still while his mind wanders. Repetition does the work that rhyme might. "Beating on, on and on" imitates a pulse, and the heart is called both "that old tireless machine" and "my little heart," so the mechanical and the tender sit side by side.
The imagery moves through the senses, from the chill of the gel to the warmth of the arm, then to perfume, and finally to sound. By the end the heart is no longer a romantic symbol. It is "loud thuds," "the churning, the sloshing around of my blood," a bodily, slightly comic noise. Even the phrase "air-conditioned intimacy" holds a contradiction, since the closeness is real but chilled and clinical.
The central stanza is where the poem lifts out of anecdote: "Echo, echoes of the past / Echoes of the heartbeats, of heartbreaks, / Echoes of youth, of love…" Changing one syllable turns "heartbeats" into "heartbreaks," joining biology to emotional history. The trailing ellipsis lets the memory fade rather than closing it off.
The ending is deliberately small. He glimpses her "graceful fingers" before she "moved her hand away," and the poem lets that fleeting touch stand as the whole encounter. Then comes the isolated closing line: "I could fall in love with / All the women in the world." It is a joke, an exaggeration that follows naturally from his mood. It is also wistful, because desire here is not aimed at anyone in particular. It has become a general appetite for life. Whatever the scan says about thickening walls, the heart in the poem is clearly not finished.
That is the poem's real significance. It treats ageing, mortality and desire with honesty and humour, without pretending that dignity means feeling nothing. The speaker is neither a villain nor a fool, only a person still alive to beauty, and the poem argues that this is worth a smile rather than a sigh.