Balachandran V's "Immobile" is an elegy for an older friend, a quiet painter and photographer whom the speaker met in the evenings on a verandah. The speaker remembers their talks about murals, the old town, and the temples with their cracked, vivid walls. Small details bring the man to life: his tall, tired frame, his wispy beard, the way he borrowed cigarettes and smoked them "religiously." The poem insists that friendship has nothing to do with age or blood, and grows quickly, "like Jack's beans."
The mood is gentle and quietly sad. The speaker doesn't wail over the loss. Instead, grief appears in an ordinary act: pausing over a name in a phone, unable to delete a number nobody will answer. The ending is the most affecting part. The thumb hesitates, then moves, and the poem stops before the final press of "yes." That unfinished moment suggests how hard it is to let go.