We usually picture the river of life as something that carries us along, full and forward-moving. Balachandran V, in a poem dated Trivandrum, 16 November 2008, gives us the opposite: a stretch of "barren land" where the river is barely a river at all. The speaker wades across it, hopeful at first, and ends up facing the only other living thing in sight, a vulture feeding on "the carcass of a man." The central idea is that life's crossing offers no comfort or guidance. The world is indifferent at best and predatory at worst, and the meaning we cling to may be a grim one.
The poem begins with a warning. The riverbank is "portentous / Of the path ahead," and the mud "sucks in my feet like a cavernous mouth / Of a carnivorous creature." The line that follows is the most unsettling in the poem: "I am half – willing to be sucked in." The speaker is already tempted by surrender before the crossing begins. The hungry mouth of the bank also plants an image that returns at the end, when the vulture appears and the bank itself seems to have "eyes" that "glitter." The landscape is a single watching creature, and the speaker is walking across its body.
Sound and rhythm carry much of the mood. There is no rhyme and no steady metre, only free verse that changes pace with the speaker's nerves. The description of the riverbed is full of slow, slithering sounds: "squelchy, soggy soil," and later stones that are "Slimy, slippery, smiling wryly." The repeated s and l sounds make the reader's tongue slide the way a foot would on wet rock. The stepping sequence ("Stepping on each, scrubbing the slime / Gripping, putting weight onto the foot") is built from strung-together participles, so the sentence moves as cautiously as the walker. Then the pattern breaks. "The current is stronger now. / The potholes are deeper now" repeats the same blunt structure twice, and the speaker's fear spills out in "I stumble, I sway, I stagger." Even the punctuation seems to lose its footing, with dashes and a hyphen scattered through the last lines.
The poem is also full of faces that do not care. The water is "Lukewarm, indifferent, / It hardly cares who I am." The stones smile "wryly," as if they know something. At the end the vulture looks up "with a benign smile." Each smile is a small horror, because it is friendly in form and empty or threatening in meaning. The refugees simile works the same way. The sandbanks look "Forlorn, looking woebegone / Like refugees weary, resting their limbs," which makes the dry riverbed a place of displaced, exhausted people, where nobody belongs.
The most striking moment may be the exclamation "Life! Life! Another one! / I find meaning for mine." The speaker has been scanning for "signs of life" and spots "a bird" on the far side. Judging by the ending, this bird may well be the vulture, though the poem never says so. If so, the joke is bitter. The speaker finds purpose in the company of a scavenger, a creature whose life depends on death. The whole poem shifts on that irony. What looked like reassurance was a warning.
The ending gives no rescue and no crossing completed. We never learn whose body the vulture is eating, though the phrase "a man" leaves room to wonder whether it is a warning about, or a prediction of, the speaker's own fate. The last line, "In the cruel, shade-less sun," removes any shelter. The sun is "cruel" and "shade-less," so there is nowhere to hide and no one to look away from.
The poem is worth reading because it takes a familiar, comforting metaphor and refuses to console. Its language is plain and its images are few, but they hold together: a hungry bank, indifferent water, smiling stones, a patient bird. The result is a short, uneasy picture of how it feels to move through life unsure whether anything is on your side.