The word "Homeland" usually calls up flags and borders. Balachandran V's poem gives it a smaller, wetter meaning: leeches on the legs, steam rising off the soil, a tusker half-mistaken for a rock. The poem never says it is about belonging until its last line, "I am home," which stands alone after eight stanzas of close looking. The poem is built to earn that sentence.
It begins from a distance. In the opening stanza the speaker is absent, and the mountains are viewed "far away, beyond the green paddy fields", where they "stand like sentinels." Sentinels guard and keep watch, so the landscape starts as something formal and slightly remote. Then the poem walks in. "I" arrives in the second stanza, with leaves that "bear my weight in silence," and each stanza moves closer to the senses: the leeches climbing the legs, the wet soil, a cough heard from somewhere. By the end the sentinels have turned into hills that "beckon" and shola trees that "raise gnarled and knotted hands," like elders waving a traveller in.
The poem is in free verse, with no rhyme and no regular line length. The irregularity works like walking: some lines stretch out as the eye sweeps over a view, others stop short. The breaks in the speaker's attention are marked by punctuation. "A bird? A boar? A deer?" stutters the way a startled mind does, and the dashes in "across the ridge, a rock shifts –" create a held breath before the tusker is revealed. The stanzas are all five lines until the penultimate one swells to nine, as if the speaker can no longer keep the landscape contained. Then the poem shrinks to a single line.
The imagery is unusually exact. The species names (Scarlet Minivets, Pipit, Wagtail, Bush Chats, Flycatchers, Sambar, Tahr, the Malabar giant squirrel) are capitalised like proper names, as though they were acquaintances rather than specimens. Judging by those names and the "Sholas," the setting seems to be the hill forests of southern India, though the poem never needs to say so. Colour arrives in bursts: the "hazy gray blending into darker black" of the distant ridge gives way to the Minivets "like flashes of fire." The sounds are exact too. A Sambar "coughs," and the squirrel's calls fill the forest. The speaker can't tell whether the cough comes "from afar – or is it nearby," which suggests a person listening so hard that distance blurs.
The poem also makes the landscape playful. Puddles "overflow and jump merrily," water goes "tickling the grass," and a frog sits "meditating" as it passes. These small personifications prepare for the bolder ones near the end. The wind arrives as "old friends hugging / And roughing up my hair," and the Tahr "looks askance" and asks, in plain colloquial speech, "Where you been all these days?" The sudden drop into casual talk is the poem's warmest moment, because the forest speaks to the speaker as a friend would to someone long absent.
Even the discomforts are part of the welcome. The leeches "reach out" and "clamber up," verbs that sound almost eager. The speaker does not flick them off but simply pauses. Home here is not an idealised postcard but a place where the body is touched, soaked, and climbed over, and still feels safe. The same logic explains the one outburst of feeling, "In awe, with love, oh with so much love," at the sight of the tusker. The love is for something large, wild, and not owned.
The poem is worth reading because it turns a naturalist's careful observation into an argument about belonging. Home is where you can name the birds, read the silence, and be recognised in return. The final image, mist "enwrapping me with love," completes the shift: the mountains that began as distant guards now hold the speaker in their arms.