Few rooms seem less promising for a poem than a bathroom, yet Balachandran V turns his into a fortress, a theatre and a confessional at once. "Bathroom Babel" begins by calling it "a secure place / With a little window to the world", and the next line quietly complicates that safety. The window is "two-way", made "to look out / And to look within." The room is a lookout post, but it is also a mirror, and everything that follows can be read through that double glass.
The refuge is less peaceful than the speaker claims. Water runs "chuckling", a friendly little personification, "Washing away dirt; sins too", where the semicolon slips from the physical to the moral. Then the mood sharpens. The resident spider "sprints / With a cockroach in its mouth," and the speaker sprinkles water at a gecko. The predation he fears outside is already going on in his hiding place, and he takes a small part in it himself. The poem never points this out, which makes the irony stronger.
The third stanza opens with a fragment, "A stage", and then piles up infinitives: "To enact my fantasies / To practice a speech / To sing a song / To talk to my love". The list moves from public to private, from speech-making to tenderness. The last line breaks the pattern: "Or imagine making love." The verb shifts from doing to imagining, and the room suddenly feels lonelier. This is where the title earns its place. Babel is the biblical tower of tangled languages, and here a single small room holds oratory, song and whispered intimacy. All of it is rehearsal, with no audience.
Through the window, nature goes about its business without a single verb of effort: "a spider squats in its web / A cocoon hangs from a leaf / A Koel sings, a Kingfisher shrugs". The unpunctuated lines read like glances. The kingfisher's shrug is funny, since even the birds seem unbothered by the speaker's worries. The Koel, kingfisher and gecko, along with the place-name under the title, suggest a warm, green setting. The cocoon is worth noticing too, because it is a hiding place from which something is meant to emerge, which is what the bathroom is for the speaker. Even this calm stanza has a menace, though, in the squatting spider and the crow cleaning its beak.
Then comes the dash in "Farther, the world waits –" and the tone changes. The world is a bruiser getting ready for a fight, "Sharpening its claws / Cracking its knuckles / Gnashing its teeth". The verbs mix animal and human threat, and the hard *c* and *k* sounds, which already crackled through the Koel and cocoon stanza, now turn aggressive. The stanza ends on "The world waits for me", a line that is both anxious and a little vain. The speaker feels hunted and also important.
His reaction is stated plainly: "I hide in my bathroom / Comforted by its damp coziness". The word "hide" is honest, and "damp coziness" is deliberately unglamorous. "Bracing to be eaten alive" turns an everyday idiom into a literal picture, and by now the spider and its cockroach have prepared us for it.
The final stanza names the room "A buffer zone, a barrier", language borrowed from borders and conflict. It shields the speaker from "banalities and bitter realities", two enemies joined by alliteration, the dull and the cruel. Yet the poem ends by making the bathroom more than a shelter. It "determines / What I am, what I like to be; / And what I do not want to be." The last clause is a negative, so the self is defined partly by what it fears becoming.
The poem is significant for its candour and its range. It uses plain speech, free verse with no rhyme scheme, and short lines that sound like thinking aloud. It takes a humble, even comic setting and finds in it a very recognisable feeling, the wish for one private place where we can practise being ourselves before facing everyone else. Its humour keeps that wish from turning into self-pity, and its imagery quietly hints that the world we hide from may already be at work in the room where we hide.