A man stands under his mango tree and, instead of simply enjoying it, tries to picture it gone. That small act of imagination drives Balachandran V's "When I am no more," marked Trivandrum, 10.07.09. On the surface it is a thought experiment about felling a tree. Underneath, it is about how much of a life collects in one spot, and the title hints that the real disappearance being imagined is the speaker's own.
The opening stanza is brisk and blunt. Leaves, mangoes, branches and birds are removed one after another, and then comes "The thick trunk sawed off, roots pulled out / Tiles or cement choking the earth." No one is named as the person doing this. The destruction is passive and impersonal, as if it simply happens once the speaker is no longer there to prevent it. That is an inference from the title, but the poem seems to invite it. "Choking" is the sharpest word here, because it makes paving feel like suffocation.
The second stanza begins like a householder weighing pros and cons: "For one, sunlight would be brighter; and glare / Upon the tiled roof." Even the benefits sound faintly unappealing, since "glare" is hardly a reward. Then the list of relief follows: no yellowed leaves to sweep, no droppings to wash off, no "bat-eaten, splattered mangoes," no flies. Each "No more" begins as a chore crossed off. But the refrain slowly changes meaning. By "No more air, thick / With the smell of the ripe, golden fruits," the speaker has stopped complaining. The line break leaves "thick" hanging at the end of the line, so the smell seems to have weight.
Then a comma slips in. Earlier lines say "No more yellowed leaves," but now we get "No more, the tapping of the woodpecker." The punctuation is small, yet it slows the voice, as though the speaker must pause before naming each loss. The nouns that follow are mostly sounds: tapping, screeching, creaking, chatter, squabbling, scuttling. The poem is noisy on purpose, and the repeated "No more" switches those noises off one at a time. Woodpecker, kites, night heron, crows and squirrels make up a whole neighbourhood, and the crows "squabbling" and the heron "resting" sound almost like neighbours seen from a window.
The third stanza moves from sound to movement and colour. The branches have a "wind-dance," the leaves "chatter," and the phrase "the green, greeting my eyes" turns a colour into something that welcomes him, with the repeated *g* sounds adding to the warmth. Then comes the poem's turning point: "No more, I, the boy / who gazed up the tree, longing, with love." For the first time the speaker puts himself on the list of things that will vanish. The commas isolate the "I" as the tree's other half. The creaking swing suggests, though the poem never says so, that the tree belongs to childhood, and that the boy and the old man are the same person looking up at the same branches.
The ending steps back into the present: "I look around for a fallen twig - / Last mangoes of the season dangle in the sky." The twig may be meant for knocking down fruit, which would be a boyish gesture, but that is a guess. What matters is that the tree is still standing and the nightmare has lifted. Yet "Last" carries the shadow of everything before it, and the mangoes hang "in the sky" rather than on a tree, as if the branches had already faded and only the fruit remained. The dash works as a hinge between the two lines. The poem closes on an image, not a statement, and never says "I am afraid of dying."
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme. It opens with one long, easy, conversational line and then breaks into short, repeated ones. Many line ends have no punctuation, so the lists run on like thoughts arriving faster than they can be fenced in. The plain language suits the subject, since nothing here is grander than a garden.
The poem matters because it argues by subtraction. By removing the tree, it shows that the things we grumble about, such as the mess, the flies and the noise, are the same things that make a place alive. It also does this without sentimentality: the speaker lists his irritations first, and affection arrives almost against his will.