Grief usually arrives in big images: funerals, graves, black clothes. Balachandran V's "Immobile" looks for it somewhere smaller and stranger, in the contacts list of a mobile phone. The poem, dated Trivandrum, 21 July 2009, is an elegy for an older friend, and its real subject is how hard it is to let one tiny, practical act stand in for a goodbye.
It opens almost as an argument. The speaker admits to forgetting the date of the death, mentions that the friend was nearly twenty years older, then dismisses the whole idea: "time isn't really a measure for anything." The second stanza backs this up. Siblings can be "the most distant", while friendship needs hardly a moment to take seed and then grows "like Jack's beans". The fairy-tale comparison is playful, and it suits a bond that seems to have grown without effort. There is also an irony the poem never points out. The speaker has forgotten the date but cannot delete the number, so the calendar loses to the object. Grief here lives in things, not in anniversaries.
The long middle stanza is the poem's memory chamber. We get a quick sketch of the friend, a painter, photographer and cartoonist with a "tall, tired frame and wispy beard", who looks like a philosopher. Then the evenings on the verandah begin, and the lines start to pour out. Almost nothing interrupts them, so the reader sits in on the talk. The friend speaks of the old town, the river, the lakes, the brahmins with their paddy fields, and temples "staggering with age". That personification makes the buildings sound unsteady on their feet, like old men. The murals on their "cracked walls" are described with a painter's relish and a gossip's irreverence: women with "globular breasts" and "wasp-like waists" who smile "like Mona Lisa", demons brandishing swords, goddesses stomping on severed heads. The verbs are loud and physical, almost cartoonish, and they sit in deliberate contrast to the subject of "the passing of ways of life". Painted figures keep up their violence and flirtation on crumbling plaster while the world around them fades. The friend is becoming one of those vanishing things, and the speaker is the last listener.
After all this noise comes a two-line stanza with a small joke: the friend would borrow a cigarette and smoke it "religiously". The word lands softly after all the temples and goddesses. Devotion shrinks to a habit, and the detail is the kind only a close friend would remember. Notice, too, "in between pauses", because pausing becomes the poem's key action.
When the poem returns to the present, the language goes flat and bare. "These two numbers I will never call / No one would answer either." There is no metaphor to soften it. The word "pause" comes back twice, "I pause" and "Yet I pause", so the easy silences of conversation turn into the stalled silence of mourning. Then the speaker looks at their own "left thumb" as though it belonged to someone else, "wondering why / It would not move". The body has become a stranger, which is how shock often feels. This is also where the title makes sense. "Immobile" fits the thumb, but it also fits the dead friend, the frozen murals, the aged temples and the speaker's stalled heart.
Structurally the poem is free verse, with no rhyme and uneven lines that follow speech more than metre. The stanzas run 4, 4, 4, then a long swell of memory, then contract to 2, 6 and 5 lines as the poem narrows into the present moment. The ending is the cleverest part. "Then it does": the thumb moves, the phone asks "Delete?", and the last line says "all my thumb has to do is press 'yes'", followed by a dash. We never see the press. The word "all" understates a movement that is physically trivial and emotionally enormous, and the open dash leaves the speaker, and us, hovering.
The poem matters because it finds the new shape of old sorrow. A phone number is the modern gravestone, and deleting it feels like a second death. The poem does not tell us how to feel. It simply holds a thumb above a button and asks us to stay there a while.