Balachandran V's "The leftover", marked Trivandrum, 2009, begins like a piece of blunt advice and ends like a quiet ritual. Its central idea is that the past is the one thing a person truly owns, yet owning it does not mean it stays vivid. Memory can be both indelible and perishable, and the poem lets those two facts sit uncomfortably side by side.
The opening stanza sounds almost impatient. "Do not look / to the future" is an order, and the reason given is dry and deflating: "It needn't necessarily come." The stumbling run of n sounds in "needn't necessarily" gives the line a shrug. The speaker then dismisses "smart people" and makes a bold claim: "Past is the only truth." The missing article makes it read like a proverb, something to be carved rather than argued. Even the present gets only a grudging mention: it is "now, / whether you like it or not."
The second stanza tightens the grip on that claim. "Yours, yours alone" repeats the possessive, and then three heavy adverbs and adjectives arrive in a row: "Undeniably, unchangeably, / Indelible". Their negative prefixes slam one door after another. The imagery turns violent. The past is "burned onto your brain, / Scarring it forever," so memory is less a gift than a brand. Nothing here is nostalgic.
Then the poem changes direction. The third stanza leaves argument behind and gives us a scene, and the tone is suddenly domestic and almost gentle. "On a summer morning / Shake it all down on a mat, / Lay it on the sun." The pronoun "it" is never explained. We assume it is the past, but the verbs treat it like something physical, like bedding aired out or produce set to dry. That is an inference from the actions, since the poem never names the object. This is where its cleverest turn lies. The same past that was "burned" into the brain by fierce heat is now being warmed by gentle heat, and the result is not permanence but decay. It turns "brittle," it will "Shrink and twist," it grows "Matted with dust." The word "mat" quietly returns inside "Matted," as if the surface itself were clinging to what lies on it. The last verbs, "curl and shrivel," are the language of dried leaves.
The speaker's posture matters too. "Hunched, on your haunches, / Head propped up by hands" is a body made small and still, and the h sounds in "Hunched" and "haunches" add a heavy, exhaling weight. Nothing is done to the memories except watching. The single word "Warming," left alone on its line, stretches time out, as though the morning itself were slow. The speaker never interferes and never rescues anything. That passivity is oddly moving.
The tension between stanzas two and three is the poem's real argument. If the past is "the only truth," what happens when truth shrivels? The poem does not answer. Perhaps indelible means only that the marks remain, not that the memories stay full. Perhaps the scars are what survive when the living detail dries out.
The brief final stanza makes this plainer. "When night falls, / Gather them - / The leftovers of your life." Now the singular "it" has broken into a plural "them," so the past has been reduced to pieces. The word "leftovers" is humble and a little startling. It suggests scraps from a meal, what remains after the best has been consumed, and it makes a whole life sound like something to be tidied away. The dash after "them" leaves a small gap before the final line. We cannot tell whether the gathering is tender or merely practical, whether the speaker is saving these scraps or sweeping them up. The title's singular "leftover" against the closing plural hints that the whole life may finally be felt as one thing.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and short, plain lines, and the plainness is the point. A tidier, more musical form would give the past a dignity the speaker seems unwilling to offer. The stanzas run from seven lines to ten and then drop to three, so the poem itself seems to shrink and curl as it goes.
Its quiet strength comes from refusing comfort. It does not tell us that memory heals or that the future redeems us. It offers an ordinary morning, an ordinary mat, and an honest picture of what remains.