Few poems begin somewhere less glamorous than a cramped toilet at midnight, and that is exactly the point. Balachandran V's "Spider in the Toilet," tagged Trivandrum and 2019, takes a place we usually want to forget and turns it into the setting for a quiet friendship. The speaker sits a foot from a spider, studies her by headlamp, and decides that this small, awkward meeting is one of the more honest relationships in his life.
The central idea arrives in the closing couplet: "A cubicle of a toilet is a safe place / For friends, outcasts, to come together." The word "outcasts" matters. It suggests that the speaker counts himself among the creatures who sit "mute, still, watching me," the ants, geckos and frogs that share his lonely nights. The poem's warmth comes from the idea that those who are overlooked, or avoided, recognise each other. The cubicle is "claustrophobic," and the speaker admits it is "the reason none other dare use it." The line is ambiguous. It could mean the tight space puts people off, or the eight-legged tenant does. Either way, unpopularity makes the room "exclusive," and the speaker's ironic pride in that word is one of the poem's first jokes.
The humour is gentle and depends on a comic reversal of manners. The spider is "very polite, seemingly embarrassed" by having to witness his "nocturnal / Passage of the bowels," and so "pretends / To be busy with cleaning herself up." The speaker treats the spider like a well-bred neighbour who looks away from an awkward moment. The euphemistic phrasing ("nocturnal passage") reads like a formal bureaucratic report on something very ordinary, and the gap between the two is funny. The speaker twisting himself "awkwardly" to focus the camera adds a physical comedy that undercuts any pretension. Yet the poem never mocks the spider, and the joke is always on the human.
There is no rhyme and no regular rhythm here. The poem is free verse, and its line lengths wobble in a conversational way. Some lines run long and chatty ("I sit on the seat, hardly a foot away from her"), while others are clipped ("Geckos and frogs"). The odd lowercase openings ("in the dim light," "and days in toilets") and the spaced bracket in "( or her ancestors)" give it the feel of something jotted down in the moment, like a diary entry. The stanzas are uneven too. A long middle stanza drifts from the spider into memories of other nights, as though the speaker's thoughts wander the way they do when you sit alone in the dark. Then two short closing stanzas pull the poem tightly toward its conclusion.
Sound does what rhyme would normally do. In the fourth stanza, "companionable, comfortable / Camaraderie" repeats its soft c and m sounds, so the words themselves feel snug. The list "Dogs, dragonflies and arachnids of different hues" is built on a pleasing d rhythm, and the formal word "arachnids" next to the homely "dogs" shows the speaker's wide, unsnobbish sense of who counts as company. Light is also a quiet motif. The spider's eyes "twinkle" as "the light of the headlamp lights her up," a repetition that makes the beam feel almost tender. Midnight, meanwhile, with its "stroke," lends the meeting a faint fairy-tale ceremony.
The poem does contain one small tension. The speaker is "observing her through the camera," so he is watching while claiming to be watched. But the spider "isn't afraid of me; nor am I of her," and that mutual ease softens the intrusion. The poem's vocabulary of friendship ("conversation," "companionable," "friends") is all built on silence. Nothing is said, and nothing needs to be.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal to accept the usual rankings of what is clean, noble or worth noticing. It finds dignity in a small, overlooked room and in a creature many people would flinch from. In doing so it argues, lightly and without sermonising, that kinship is often found where we least expect it. It is a modest poem, but it leaves you looking more closely at the corners of your own day.