A hospital waiting room is usually a place of magazines and nerves, but Balachandran V turns it into something closer to a confessional. Dated Trivandrum, 24 March 2010, the poem puts two men in thin gowns, each waiting to be called in for what the text suggests is a heart procedure: catheters, stents, bypass. Nothing dramatic happens. Nobody is wheeled away. Yet the speaker ends up at a quiet, odd, honest idea. What we leave in other minds is small and accidental, and there is a strange comfort in that smallness.
The opening gets its effect from awkwardness. "Facing each other, though not really / Facing each other" repeats itself and stumbles, just as the two men do, catching eyes, glancing "swiftly away", then watching "covertly". The details are comic and humane: a gown "just below our knees", flaps held by "bits of Velcro", the old man "demurely pulling down" the fabric. Illness has taken away the usual armour of clothes and status, and what is left is embarrassment.
The poem is free verse with no fixed metre. Line lengths shift, and the voice sounds like someone telling the story afterwards, not polishing it. Rhyme appears only briefly, which makes it stand out. "Lewd" and "nude" chime in a small comic jolt as the tubes look indecent and the shaven forearm feels "embarrassingly nude". Then "hands" and "stands" tie the tubes to the hanging sachets. Elsewhere the lines break to control pace. "Waiting / To be dissected / To be disemboweled / And sewn up back" is stacked so that each line is a slow step towards the knife. The repeated passive "To be" turns the men into objects, "specimens in the biology lab". The casual, almost schoolboy phrase "sewn up back" keeps the horror at the level of a dark joke, which is how frightened people often cope.
The most inventive image is "Our hearts were hung in question marks." It works visually, since the curling catheters and the sachets dangling from stands both resemble the punctuation mark. It also names the mood: no one knows the outcome. Straight after it comes "Balloon, stent or bypass – new words in my vocabulary." Here the speaker is a layman, learning the language of his own body only when it is under threat.
The turn arrives with a change of tense. Until now the poem has been in the past, but "Caught unawares, our glances meet – he smiles; I smile back" is in the present, as though this smile is the one moment that still feels live. The speaker notes their ages, "seventies" and "fifties", and the poem doesn't say what that means. One reading is that the old man shows him a possible future. They become "comrades in despair", a half-joking, soldierly phrase, and the comfort is described as "strange" because it comes from someone he does not know.
Meanwhile love reaches him only in pieces. Through the swing door he glimpses "a face, a smile, a wave of the hand", a series of fragments that vanish when the door closes. Oddly, his thoughts then go to his dogs. The short lines "Not knowing what befell me / What prevented me / From coming home" give the animals a bewilderment that is more moving for being so plainly stated. "Coming home" is the simplest phrase in the poem, and it carries the most feeling.
The last two stanzas are brief and unsettling. If he dies, he will carry "this old man's face" to his grave, so a stranger becomes his final witness. Then comes the paradox: he is "comforted" that even his dogs will probably not keep him in their memories. The poem doesn't explain why, so the reader has to. I take it as humility, an acceptance that the world goes on without us and that grief, like memory, is not permanent. It may even feel like freedom, since he does not have to matter forever.
That is why the poem lasts. It avoids heroics and self-pity. It also makes "waiting one's turn" mean more than sitting in a hospital corridor, since everyone is waiting for something. Fear shrinks two men to the same size, and a smile between them turns out to be enough.