A watch repairer's counter is about as ordinary a place as poetry can find, and Balachandran V's "Chronographics" makes it quietly frightening. On the surface it records a small errand: someone hands over a watch and waits. Underneath, the shop becomes something between an operating theatre and a mortuary, and the poem ends with the speaker realising that what lies on the counter is not only a mechanism but his own time.
The first stanza moves in like a slow camera shot. "Behind the rectangular glass case" fixes the frame, and then comes a run of noun phrases with no main verb: "A bent head... A lens... A forceps in hand." The repeated "A" turns each detail into a separate snapshot, and the watchmaker is broken into parts, a head, an eye, a hand. He seems less a man than a function. The lamp that lights him "sideways" gives him the dramatic glow of a surgeon in an old painting, while the lens "stuck into the socket" of his eye has a faintly violent edge. The enjambment in "drawing out / The innards of a dead watch" makes us wait for the line to finish, as if the extraction were happening at the pace of the reading.
Sound takes over in the second stanza. "Tickers tick loud" is made of heavy, clipped syllables, so the line itself ticks. "Tickers" is also slang for hearts, which quietly turns clock noise into heartbeat, and the next line answers with "Tolling, the impending doom." Tolling is what bells do at funerals, and the inverted phrasing, with its pause after the comma, lets the sentence toll too. The vocabulary of the body keeps growing: the watches "lie about" like patients or corpses, "in various states of disembowelment," and that long, clinical word stands out among the plain ones. Then comes the simile of the big old clocks hanging on the walls "like Capuchin monks in the catacombs." If the poem is thinking of the well-known Capuchin catacombs, where the preserved bodies of monks are displayed along the walls, the comparison is chilling. The tall, dark, hanging clocks become watchful remains, a reminder that time ends in death.
The third stanza brings in a human voice for the first time. "How precise!" is an exclamation of admiration, but the verbs that follow, "wield" and "stab," and the word "underbelly" turn the admiration uneasy. The same delicate fingers are also a threat. The possessive matters too: until now the watch was "a dead watch," anonymous and on someone else's table, and suddenly it is "my watch." The speaker has been looking at other people's cases and now realises he is the next patient.
The ending relies on restraint. "I stand still -" is a short line broken by a dash, and the speaker's frozen posture imitates a stopped clock. The last line, "My time is at his mercy," is flat and almost conversational, and it carries a pun. It means the watch's time, the hours it keeps, but it also means the speaker's lifespan. Handing over a watch has become handing over a little of your own mortality.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre, and that suits its subject. Instead of the predictable beat of a clock, the lines vary in length and the stanzas shrink from five lines to six to four, closing in on the speaker's moment of helplessness. The title may play on the same idea. A chronograph is a kind of watch that measures time, and "graphics" suggests vivid drawing, so the poem is a sketch of time made visible. The poem is stamped "Trivandrum" and 2009, but nothing in the text depends on that. The scene could be any watch repairer's shop.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it gets from so little. It never lectures about mortality. It lets a lens, a pair of forceps and a few ticking clocks do the work, until a routine repair feels like surrender. We trust machines to measure our lives and skilled strangers to mend them, and the poem makes that trust feel both necessary and a little alarming.