Anyone who has tried to sit still and quiet their thoughts will recognise the situation in "Belief": a person decides to listen and discovers how much there is to hear. The opening, "I am listening," is flat and declarative, almost a stage direction. What follows is an inventory of sound. The ceiling fan comes first, "the loudest, the most persistent," a hum so constant it has probably stopped registering as noise. Then the list loosens into fragments with no linking words: crows cawing, cars horning, trucks rumbling, voices across the street. Balachandran V drops connectives and most punctuation, so the sounds pile up as they do in life, without anyone ranking them.
Look closely, though, and the pile has a direction. The sounds move steadily closer. The crows, cars and trucks belong to the public world outside. Next come voices "across the street," then "Parvati moving about in the next room," a person known only by a name and the sound of her movement through a wall. The stanza ends inside the speaker's own body, with "the slow intake of breath into my lungs." That is the longest line in the list, and its long vowels and soft consonants make it slow down, as a breath does. The poem has been moving inward before the speaker announces it.
The second stanza does announce it: "I turn my ears inward." The phrase is a small impossibility, since ears cannot turn inward, and the strain shows how hard the act is. What the speaker finds is not silence, or even thought, but self-consciousness. He is "conscious of myself tapping at the keyboard." The senses blur here. He set out to listen, but the cursor is something seen, "the little black line, going on and off." The repetition "On and off, on and off" makes the line itself blink, and its steady pulse echoes the hum of the fan from the first stanza. He has travelled inward and found another machine rhythm.
The cursor is also the poem's quiet character. It is "waiting, patient," and that personification stings a little. The cursor waits for words, so it is a small reproach to a mind that is supposed to be empty, and it is more patient than the person who is trying to be still. A blank screen with a blinking mark is a good image of the blankness the speaker wants. The difference is that the screen is only waiting to be filled.
Then comes the last line, alone: "I am emptying my mind – or so I would like to believe." Only now does the title make sense. "Belief" here means a wish more than a conviction. The dash works like a hesitation, the moment the speaker catches himself mid-claim. The present tense of "am emptying" is undercut by the hedge that follows. And the poem has already disproved the claim. A mind that notices crows, a neighbour's footsteps, its own breath and a blinking cursor, and then notices itself noticing, is anything but empty. Judging by the keyboard and cursor, the poem seems to be written at the very machine it describes, so the act of writing is the proof against the speaker's belief.
The form supports this quietly. There is no rhyme, and the lines are short and plain, with none of the decoration that would add more noise to a poem about wanting less. The stanzas shrink from eight lines to six to one, as if the poem were emptying itself. Yet the one-line stanza is where the most important thought sits, so even the emptiest space is full.
The poem is small, but it earns its place by being honest about an experience most people share and few admit: the gap between what we intend to do with our minds and what they do. The dateline, "Trivandrum 27.09.2009," stamps it like a diary entry, a moment caught on a particular day with the fan humming and the crows outside. There is gentle humour in it, too. The speaker laughs at himself without cruelty, and he lets the last line stay unresolved. Many poems about stillness pretend to reach it. This one admits it was only listening, and found plenty to hear.