Balachandran V's "Lord Toad" begins as a staring contest and ends as a blessing. The speaker, marked in the text as writing from Trivandrum on 01.05.2018, is being watched by a toad and feels the need to answer. The question that opens the poem, "Why do you, Toad, look at me / So impassive, so self-assured?", sounds almost offended, as if a social superior had been caught showing off. By the final line the speaker is handing out real estate. The central idea is that a creature people tend to find repulsive, and perhaps dangerous, deserves not just tolerance but welcome.
The poem wins us over partly through tone. The title gives the toad a mock-grand rank, "Lord," and the speaker plays along. Look at the correction in "You sit - no, squat on all your fours." The dash catches the speaker mid-thought, swapping the dignified "sit" for the more honest "squat." "All your fours" bends the familiar idiom "on all fours" into something slightly absurd, as though the toad had more legs than it needs. We hear a real voice, half amused and half wary, thinking aloud rather than reciting.
The description of the toad is the most physical part of the poem. "Warty skin, wrinkled and ridged" piles up w and r sounds that are rough in the mouth, as if the words had skin of their own. Then comes the menace: "Your glands swollen with poison." The speaker admits to caution here, and the defensive "Think I didn't know?" is a small, comic flash of pride. The speaker knows what the toad is capable of. That makes the turn that follows more generous, because the welcome is offered with full knowledge of the danger.
That turn comes with "Go forth, be not afraid of me!" Here the poem changes register. The archaic phrasing sounds like a command from scripture, and the next line, "Go forth and procreate!", seems to echo the old blessing to be fruitful and multiply. But "procreate" is a clinical, almost biological word, and dropping it into that solemn frame is both funny and tender. The roles have also reversed. At the start the toad seemed to be the one unnervingly in control, but now the human is the large, possibly threatening presence who must reassure the small one. The poem quietly admits that, in a garden, we are the more dangerous party.
What the speaker offers is modest: "A blade of grass, a dried leaf / A twig to play with." The list has no punctuation at its line ends, so it drifts along like the objects it names. "To play with" is the most surprising phrase, since it turns the toad into a child given toys. Then the scale suddenly widens: "The shade of the great trees." After scraps and leftovers, the toad gets something grand, and the ordinary garden begins to feel like a kingdom fit for a "Lord."
The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre. Its lines are short and uneven, and it relies on speech rhythms, dashes and exclamations. This suits a one-sided conversation, because the toad never answers. Its silence is part of its character, and the poem seems to know it. The last line, "And over there, Kunthi, for your children!", is the one place where the poem points to something the text doesn't explain. Kunthi is never glossed. Judging by "over there," it names a spot close by, perhaps a corner of the garden or a bit of water where young toads might thrive, though the poem leaves this open. Either way, the speaker's concern now reaches past the toad to its offspring, and the poem ends on the future.
The poem matters for how lightly it makes its point. It never lectures about conservation or compassion. It only shows a person getting over a first reaction, disgust mixed with fear, and choosing to make room. Its humour keeps the sentiment from becoming sugary, and the toad, ugly and poisonous and unbothered, is allowed to stay exactly what it is.