Anyone who has dreamed of missing a train will recognise the first half of Balachandran V's "Dream traveler". The poem, marked Trivandrum, 15 June 2009, takes that familiar anxiety and follows it past panic into something quieter and more unsettling: the moment the dreamer's body gives up before the train does.
The opening stanza is built to feel like running. Its lines are long and packed with participles ("Dodging people and baggage", "Slipping, cutting across long queues"), and there is almost no end punctuation to let the reader stop. Even the geography keeps pushing forward: hallway, metal detector, platform, stairway, the next platform, down the steps. The repeated "past" ("past the metal detector", "past the vendors", "past the trolleys") turns the station into a blur of things glimpsed and left behind. The details suggest a crowded Indian station, with beggars, tea sellers and sacks of mail, and the poem sees them with a sharp, almost documentary eye.
The crowd is the poem's first contrast. The travellers "stood patiently / Tired, shoulders sloping, eyes vacant", and their stillness makes the speaker's frenzy look lonely. The single word "Asleep." gets its own line, which is a small irony. The beggars sprawled on the floor are the only people at rest, in a dream where the one person with somewhere to be cannot rest at all. Nobody in this station is cruel, only "indifferent", like the policemen. The world simply carries on at its own speed.
Then the poem turns inward. The verbs of motion (run, dodge, speed, pant) give way to verbs of collapse: "limbs droop, muscles melt". The pain is described in strange, precise terms. It is a "crushing dull pain", and the phrase "vacuum blowing up" is a deliberate paradox, an emptiness that swells like something inflated. It is "Emptying my mind of all", so the panic about the train drains away along with every other thought. The simile of weariness spreading "Like invading armies of ants" is the poem's most memorable image. Ants are tiny, slow and countless, the opposite of the speaker's sprint, and the word "armies" makes the exhaustion feel organised and unstoppable. The sound reinforces it: the soft, sliding "waves of weariness" and "muscles melt" slow the reader down just as the body slows. Whether this is a dream-version of a racing heart or a hint of something graver, the poem never says. Judging by the text, that ambiguity is intended.
The final stanza is a masterpiece of timing. The speaker leans on "a cold iron pillar", finally still, and only then does the scene reveal itself: "darkness lifts / Unfurling the rails / Glinting in the morning sun". It is beautiful, which is what hurts. The dawn arrives as a gift to the eye at the moment of loss, and it seems to come only because he has stopped. The lines shorten, and the last two do all the work: "Ahead of me, / Without me." The repeated structure, with its identical rhythm and its flip from position to absence, makes the train's departure sound like a verdict. "Ahead" can also mean ahead in time, so the sentence quietly suggests that something larger than a train is moving on.
There is no rhyme and no steady metre. The free verse lets the poem change gears, from the breathless catalogue to the stunned, short-lined ending. The title adds a last twist. A "traveler" is someone in motion, yet this one never leaves the station.
The poem matters because it takes an ordinary nightmare and shows what is under the fear of being late. The terror is not really the crowd or the clock but the body's failure and the world's calm indifference. By ending on the departing train rather than on the dreamer's pain, the poem leaves the reader standing beside him, looking at an empty track in the sun.