Most of us assume pain arrives the moment something goes wrong. Balachandran V's "Afterwards" opens by contradicting that: "The pain comes much later." The poem is about the delayed reckoning that follows a hurt, and it argues that this pain is not simply suffering. It is the first step of a process that, if lived through, ends in peace. The poem never says what happened, but its talk of "they," "you," and love "in spite of all" suggests a damaged or lost close relationship. Leaving it vague lets any reader bring their own loss to it.
The poem's main image is water. Pain comes "in trickles, then in torrents," a progression that feels true to how grief can build, from a drip you barely notice to a flood you can't stop. Then comes a surprise. The torrent is "Washing off, cleansing / Wounds, hurts, the memories." The same force that overwhelms also cleans. Pain is the wound and the water that rinses it. The line break after "cleansing" puts "Wounds" at the start of the next line, so the cleaning and the dirt meet in the white space between them.
After this flood the poem becomes orderly, almost like a case history of recovery, marked by the words "First" and "Then." What heals first are the "festering" hurts, and the word is well chosen, since festering is what happens to a wound left untreated. Here it is anger "for / What they did - / and did not." Next comes regret, "of what you did - / and did not." The two stanzas mirror each other almost exactly, but the pronoun moves from "they" to "you," so blame turns inward. The repeated "and did not" matters too. Failures of omission, the unsaid apology or the visit never made, weigh as much as the harmful acts. The dash before it works like a held breath, a pause before the poet admits the quieter guilt. The opening "should-haves / and should-have-nots" has the same two-sided shape, so the poem keeps circling the same double ledger of action and inaction.
The third stage changes the poem's whole texture. The water imagery gives way to light and scent: "like a sunbeam / breaking out through the clouds." This is the poem's only simile, and it is saved for the turning point, so it lands with extra force. What the sunbeam reveals is "that everything / carried the fragrance of love." Fragrance is a gentle, almost invisible word. It suggests something that lingers in a room after the person has left, which fits the later line, "love lingering in the shadows." The repeated l sounds in "love; love / lingering" slow the line down, and the semicolon makes love say its own name twice, as if it needs to be insisted on. "In spite of all" admits that the relationship was flawed. The poem doesn't pretend the anger or regret were mistaken, only that they weren't the whole truth. Sunbeam and shadows also sit in tension: love was present all along but hidden, and it takes the earlier stages to bring it into view.
The ending is short. "Then comes peace / Within." The poem has no rhyme and no steady metre. Its lines are uneven, and the speech-like rhythm leaves room for the sentences to run on like a mind working things through. After all that length, the closing lines are small. "Within" gets a line to itself, a single word that settles like something coming to rest. It also tells us where the peace is found. It isn't given by an apology, a reunion, or an outside change, but arrives inside the person who has done the work.
That is the poem's quiet significance. It refuses to hurry grief or to offer consolation too early. Love is recognised only after anger and regret have been faced, so the comfort feels earned. The poem also suggests that the pain we dread is part of how we heal, which is a more useful thought than telling someone simply to "move on." The title says as much. "Afterwards" is not the end of the story, but the stretch where the real work happens.