Pride is an odd thing to feel about a decrepit house, yet that is where Balachandran V begins. Around the speaker stretches a "concrete desert", and his hand-me-down home is the "oasis" in it. When people ask, a little pityingly, "Still at the old house?", he keeps his answer to himself: he is "proud and smug", because he knows something they don't. The house is crowded, and its residents are his family.
The poem's central idea is that the dead have not gone anywhere. They have changed shape and stayed on. In the second stanza the speaker points them out like a guide in a family album: "there he is, my father," hopping down from a coconut frond to nibble leftover rice, and "there she is, my mother, the bossy Jungle Crow", elbowing a squirrel aside. The humour is affectionate. Ordinary household behaviour, the nibbling and the bossing and the squabbling over scraps, is simply moved into the garden. The poem never says anyone died. The word "ghosts" appears once, in the first stanza, and then fades from the poem.
The grandmother is the funniest of the visitors. She arrives in the evening, "hooting" (which suggests an owl, though the poem doesn't name the bird), peering from behind the leaves and "muttering to herself, uttering inaudible curses". The echo between "muttering" and "uttering" imitates the murmur it describes. The curses are aimed at the speaker, "that impractical dreamer", and he reports this cheerfully. His relatives in the city probably see him the same way. Here the criticism is just one more sign that the old household is still running.
The fourth stanza widens the circle: "cousins and aunts / Maids and men, children and dogs." Servants and animals stand alongside relatives, joined by "and" with no ranking, so the house remembers everyone who lived in it. Then comes the key line, "They come as they wish, / As fairies and birds and butterflies." The title's word "fairies" quietly replaces "ghosts". A ghost haunts, but a fairy visits, and the speaker is no longer frightened of anything here. He doesn't summon these visitors, and they come and go freely.
The poem is in free verse, with no regular metre and no rhyme scheme. The speech-like lines suit a man chatting about his own garden. The stanzas are mostly four lines, and everything is in the present tense, so the past feels like part of the day. Dusk brings the poem's most musical moment: "I hear them, flitting in and out / Silently, like flickering memories". The soft *f* and *l* sounds flutter like wings, and the repeated "in and out" gives the rhythm of flight and of remembering, which comes and goes in the same way. The "old mango tree" at the end echoes the "old house" at the start, so the poem closes where it began.
The ending is its cleverest move. After all that free-flowing speech, the poem finishes on its first clean rhyme: "Who you might be, pretty Jay, / Quietly sitting, looking at me?" The chime of "be" and "me" gives the question a settled, gentle finish. The question matters too. For the first time the speaker doesn't know who a visitor is. The inverted wording, "Who you might be", sounds like someone addressing a stranger who has just landed on the fence. The bird looks back at him, so he is being watched as much as watching. The poem doesn't say whether the Jay is a forgotten relative, a new arrival or simply a bird, and that openness keeps it from feeling closed or sentimental.
The poem is significant for the way it turns loss into company, mostly through humour and small details. The speaker's "smugness" is the defiance of someone who has chosen rootedness over the "concrete desert". The poem suggests that a crumbling house can be rich if you pay attention to the creatures in the garden.