A man takes off his lungi on a rooftop in a thunderstorm, and Balachandran V turns that small act into a gentle argument about shame. The speaker begins with a question, "When was the last time...?", and asks it twice, like someone checking an account of lost pleasures. The answers are unflattering. Childhood offers no help, because mother "would have / Frisked me away and gave / A slap on my bottom too." Even the one time he did strip, on a beach, he spent blushing "at my lesser size" beside a tourist. Freedom arrived, but so did comparison, and the poem's dry afterthought, "It wasn't raining then, though," tells us something was still missing. What he wants is nakedness and rain together, with no one watching and no one measuring.
The poem is in free verse. It has no rhyme scheme and no steady metre, and its rhythm follows the weather. The early stanzas move in short, conversational lines, almost muttered. Then the storm gathers, and so does the language. The sky darkens, the treetops sway "frenzied," and the doves and crows "staggered drunk, in flight," a lovely image that makes the wind an intoxicant loosening everyone's inhibitions, birds included. The rain arrives as "The air-gun shot pellets of rain," a toy-weapon metaphor that suits the mood. It stings, but it is play. Then comes the poem's loudest moment: "the gush, the rush and it thundered!" The rhyming pair gush and rush, followed by the triple "it rained, it rained, it rained!", makes the reader hear the downpour. The line is repetitive on purpose, because rain is repetitive.
The poem is also full of small ironies about clothing. When the speaker undresses, the rain gives him a new garment: "the drape of raindrops covered me." Nakedness becomes its own kind of covering. Yet he is still cautious. He climbs to a "high terrace, hidden from eyes," so his liberation happens inside the limits of social propriety. The poem is honest about this. It shows how far a grown man must go to find a few private minutes of being unselfconscious, and the effort is both funny and slightly sad.
The last stanza is the most carefully built. Its repeated "My friends the trees... My friends the doves... My friend the wind" turns the storm into a small community, with the speaker accepted among creatures that, as the title says, don't wear clothes. The title reads like a child's retort to the scolding mother, using nature's logic against human convention. A closer look at the prepositions shows more. The trees dance "with me" and the wind laughs "with me," but the doves "giggle at me." That one word keeps a trace of self-consciousness alive. The speaker is happy, but not entirely free of being looked at, even by birds, and the poem is wise enough to leave that in.
The single closing line, set apart from everything else, is "At nearly fifty, maybe I should know better." It sounds like an apology, and the "maybe" is what undoes it. A man who was really sorry would not hedge. The line borrows the voice of the mother and of polite society, then quietly declines to obey it. It also shows the poem's tone, which is amused at the speaker's own expense without ever mocking the pleasure he found.
What makes the poem worth reading is how plainly it talks about the body. Its words, "privates," "dangling," "bottom," are unembarrassed, and the result is neither crude nor coy. The poem also takes an idea that might seem silly, a middle-aged man naked in the rain, and shows why it matters: shame is learned early, by slaps and by comparisons, and it can be set down again, if only for the length of a storm. The poem was dated in Kottayam in 2006, but its subject, the wish to be unobserved and at ease in one's skin, is not tied to any one place or year.