Hardly anyone would call doodling important, which is why Balachandran V's "Faces" is such a quiet surprise. The speaker is stuck in an office, and the poem follows what his hand does when his mind is elsewhere. It draws faces. By the last stanza these scribbles have become a question about who he is, where he comes from, and whether the people on the page are strangers at all.
The opening stanza is built to feel like the workday. "In between the sporadic bursts / Between the heckling customers / The intimidating bosses / The gossiping colleagues": four lines of nouns pile up with hardly a verb, and the sentence doesn't reach its main clause until the sixth line, "I doodle faces on bits of paper." The speaker's one private act is squeezed into the last line, just as it is squeezed into the gaps of his day. The repeated "in between" also describes the poem itself, which seems to have been made in the same stolen moments.
The second and third stanzas turn the faces into companions. "I have grown up with these people / Though they remained the same – / Adults passing through youth." The speaker has aged while his drawings stay fixed, and the odd phrase "adults passing through youth" suggests they were never children, only finished faces that appeared whole. The poem then names Picasso, whose portraits famously show a face from several angles at once, and the "full face and left profile" of the earlier lines fits that comparison neatly. There is a reversal here too. The speaker looks down at the page, yet the profiles "stare up at my face." The drawings have stopped being passive and begin to watch their maker.
The fourth and fifth stanzas are the most closely observed. The women are given a catalogue of features: full lips, wide eyes, long lashes, bindis, ear-studs, wavy hair. Their glances, however, go "off-centre, over my shoulders," and "Rare are the ones who look into my eyes." The poem doesn't explain this, but it reads like loneliness, since even the faces he invents will not meet his gaze. The men are drawn in fewer, heavier strokes: moustache, thick eyebrows, thin lips. The dash after "Pleasant to look at but –" is a small hesitation before the admission that they are "Grim and somehow sorrowful." Judging by the imagery, it is easy to suspect these men carry something of their maker's own mood, though the poem never says so. The following two-line stanza, "They all are so familiar / Though none like another," marks the turn from description to wonder. The faces are individual, yet each one feels known.
The final stanza is a run of questions that all begin "Are they," and each one widens the circle. Are these the people of his dreams? Of "lives past"? Of "the lives yet to live through"? Are they "shadows / I sense, flitting behind me"? The last question brings everything inward: "the unknown and strange / Souls I see in my own self?" The faces started out as scraps on a desk and end as possible fragments of the speaker's own identity. The poem gives no answer and stops on a question mark, which suits a subject that cannot be settled.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular metre. Line lengths vary, and the dashes and enjambed lists give the voice a loose, thinking-aloud quality, close to the wandering movement of a pencil. The plain diction ("bits of paper," "pleasant to look at") keeps the poem grounded until the questions lift it.
Its significance lies in how it treats the small and overlooked. Doodling is what we do when we are not being ourselves for anyone, and the poem suggests that this unguarded scribbling may be more honest than the official hours around it. The speaker spends his day among bosses and customers, but the faces he makes without trying seem to show him more about his own inner life than they do.