"A fish's life isn't easy." It sounds like something a tired colleague might say at the end of a long shift, and that casual, almost comic tone is the poem's first move. Balachandran V gives his fish a voice that is chatty, put-upon and slightly demanding: "Look at me." Those three words turn the reader into someone standing outside the glass, caught in the act of watching. "Aquarium" is about confinement, yet it never describes the tank. It lets a small creature list what it has lost until the losses add up to a whole way of living.
The first stanza builds its case through repetition. "I cannot close my eyes / I cannot stop moving / I cannot help hearing": three lines in the same frame, each naming a different helplessness. Fish have no eyelids, so the first line starts from plain fact before the others stretch it into something more human. Sight cannot be switched off, movement cannot be paused, and even hearing, usually the most passive sense, feels like an intrusion. Then the stanza ends on a sentence that never finishes: "All that I never wanted to." The verb is missing, and the line stops on "to", as if the fish is too weary to complete the thought. Judging by the setting, it might be pumps, taps on the glass or voices beyond the tank, but the poem leaves the gap open for readers to fill with whatever noise they cannot escape themselves.
In the second stanza the verbs change. "Cannot" gives way to "do not": "I do not sleep / I do not dream." Inability has hardened into flat report, with no protest left in it. Losing dreams matters because dreaming is the mind's way out, and this fish is denied even that. Then comes a grammatical stumble: "All I know / That a few strokes ahead." Where we expect "All I know is that", the "is" has dropped out, and the sentence lurches like a fish turning back at the wall. The measure of space is telling too, since the whole world is "a few strokes" wide. What waits at the end of those strokes is the poem's sharpest image: "I will kiss the cold reflection / of my own self." A kiss should be warm and shared, but this one is cold and solitary. The glass turns the only possible companion into the fish itself. It is a Narcissus situation with the vanity drained out and only loneliness left. The future tense, "will kiss", makes it inevitable, because every journey across the tank ends in the same place.
The form matches this narrowness. There is no rhyme and no regular beat, just short, plain lines that seem to have nothing ornamental left in them. Inside the stanzas there is almost no punctuation, so the lines run on without full stops, like laps. The two six-line stanzas also mirror each other: the first lists what the fish cannot stop doing, the second what it does not do, like two walls of the same tank.
Then, set apart as a single line, comes the prayer: "Thank you, Lord, for this glass cage..." Its tone is impossible to pin down. It may be bitter sarcasm. It may be real resignation, the habit of gratitude that survives when nothing is left to be grateful for. The "Lord" could even be the keeper who set up the glass. The trailing ellipsis refuses to decide. The word "cage" is pointed as well. We might expect "tank" or "bowl", but "cage" brings in the vocabulary of prisoners and caged birds, while "glass" makes the bars invisible. This is a prison you can see through and be seen in, which takes us back to "Look at me."
The poem is small, but it does a lot. It takes a household ornament and makes it a figure for anyone who is always switched on, always overhearing, never resting, always moving without arriving anywhere. It does this in a few dozen words, and the last line makes the reader go back and hear every earlier line differently. The poem carries a place and a date, Trivandrum, 2009, but nothing in it depends on them. The fish's complaint and its odd thanks work on their own.