Few of us would think of a wardrobe as a confidant, yet Balachandran V's "The Almirah" speaks to one the way you might speak to an old friend who has kept your secrets. The speaker addresses the cupboard as "you," and what starts as a quiet inventory of its contents turns into an aching, half-envious confession. The almirah will be renewed, and the speaker, it seems, will not.
The first stanza builds its list through repetition. "Somewhere in your corners deep" appears twice, like a hand rummaging again through the same dark space, and each time something different surfaces: "my love's first letter to me," "my dreams smothered dead," fears "swaddled in clothes," a chempaka flower with "fragrance faint." The verbs repay attention. The letter and the dreams "lie," but the fears "tremble," so only the fears are still alive. "Swaddled" is a word for wrapping a baby, which suggests the fears are tended almost tenderly while the dreams are suffocated. The cupboard becomes nursery and grave at once. The flower among "faded silks" is the gentlest image, and its faint scent suggests memory thinning out rather than breaking suddenly. The singular verbs after plural subjects ("Lies my dreams," "Trembles my fears") and the inverted word order give these lines a slightly old-fashioned, spoken lilt. Whether or not that was intended, each heap of dreams or fears reads like a single weight.
In the second stanza the almirah becomes a keeper: "These books that you hold for me, / These clothes that you keep for me." The parallel phrasing is like a thank-you. Then the objects turn into the self: "remnants of my self, uncared for." The cupboard preserves, but no one tends what it preserves, and that contradiction drives the stanza. The future arrives in a brisk, domestic verb: "Somebody would sweep it all off." The anonymous "somebody" and the word "sweep" suggest how little a stranger would feel handling a lifetime's relics. What follows sounds almost like an advertisement, with "a new coat," polished glass and "sparkles of a new life." The exclamation "so blessed are you!" can be read as tenderness or as bitterness. I hear both, because the almirah is given the fresh start the speaker's own "weary life" lacks. The phrase "not long after have I left" is also worth noting. It never says where the speaker is going, and that vagueness lets the line hold departure and ending together.
The third stanza is the shortest, and the shrinking is meaningful. The stanzas run eight lines, then nine, then four, so the poem seems to empty out as it goes, like a cupboard being cleared. The vocabulary shifts too. "Somewhere" becomes "Someplace," and then "someone, anyone." The poem is full of these unspecific words: somewhere, somebody, someplace, someone. The speaker has no definite place and no definite person, only hopeful gestures at them. "Anyone" lowers the demand almost to nothing, and the dash before it reads like a pause to swallow pride. The final line, "bare, empty shelves," piles two near-synonyms on top of each other. After a poem about a crowded cupboard, the ending is about space. The shelves could be the almirah's, or they could be the speaker's own life, and the poem leaves that open. The prayer addressed to God gets no answer.
There is no regular rhyme here. Repetition does the work that rhyme usually does: "deep" returns to "deep," "for me" echoes "for me," and "These" opens line after line like an offering. The lines are short and conversational, with about four beats each, so the poem sounds like something murmured to a piece of furniture when no one else is in the room.
The poem is significant for how much it asks of one ordinary object. It is dated Trivandrum, 27.05.2009, and the chempaka flower and the word "almirah" give it a South Asian household texture. The feeling underneath is not local, though. The poem shows how a life can be stored in cloth and paper, and how that storage can outlast the hope that gave it meaning. Its ending offers no consolation, only a plain, human request to be kept, as the cupboard keeps what it holds.