A man walks down a lit street at night, convinced he is being followed, and it takes him most of the poem to admit that the follower is his own shadow. In "The Shadow Man," Balachandran V turns that small trick of light into a journey from fear to tenderness. It ends with a question that is really about the speaker's own death.
The opening builds menace through sound. The shadow is "Black, stout like a thug / Sticking close to my heels," and the hard consonants of "stout," "thug," "sticking" and "close" feel like a shoulder jostling in a crowd. The speaker's reaction is almost comic. He walks away "casually, as if unhurriedly," and the doubled adverbs suggest someone overdoing his nonchalance and performing calm he does not feel. The shadow, meanwhile, behaves exactly as shadows do. Under a streetlight it slides from behind to ahead, and "Taller, taller, he stretches himself." The repeated comparative makes the line itself stretch, so we can almost see the figure lengthening on the pavement. Then the shadow "pales himself / Into the lights and shades of the doorways," the speaker "sigh[s] comforted," and the figure "looms again beneath the next streetlight." The pattern of fear, relief and fear again matches the rhythm of walking a street, lamp after lamp.
The poem is in free verse. It has no rhyme scheme, and the lines vary in length, so it reads like a mind speaking and not like a song. Its patterns come from repetition. "Heels" appears early and returns in "Now behind, now at my heels," like a refrain. That line begins a run of parallel phrases, "Now snaking, now sneaking away from me," where the hissing s-sounds of "snaking" and "sneaking" imitate the slide of the shadow across the ground. The rhythm quickens until a passing car makes him "streak" and vanish. In the middle of this comes the poem's boldest comparison: "Like an omnipresent God." The leap from street thug to deity is startling. It suggests that the speaker has begun to sense something he cannot escape, a presence that is always there, watched or unwatched. A god is also a companion of sorts, and the simile quietly prepares for the poem's turn.
The turn arrives in the short sentences "I pause. I realize he is an unobtrusive friend." Earlier the speaker "hesitate[d]" and then pushed on "bravely," always moving. Only now does he stop, and stopping lets him see. "Unobtrusive" is the thug's opposite, yet it describes the same figure. Nothing about the shadow has changed, only the way it is read. The next line, "The only one I can call my own," is the emotional centre. Judging by the text, the speaker is lonely enough that a shadow is his one real companion, though the poem does not say why, and it is better not to guess.
The grammar changes too. The shadow is "him" and "he" until the last two lines, when the speaker addresses it directly: "My friend! I weep for you!" These are the poem's only exclamations. After so much careful observation, feeling breaks the surface, and the shift from "he" to "you" shows the distance between the two closing.
The last line, "Where will you go when I am gone?", is the cleverest. A shadow cannot outlive the body that casts it, so the speaker's worry for his friend is a displaced worry for himself. He cannot quite say "I am afraid of dying," but he can grieve on behalf of something that depends on him. The poem also reverses the usual order. We expect the living person to be the one who is mourned, and here the speaker mourns the shadow he will leave behind.
The poem is significant because it makes a familiar sight strange. Almost everyone has glanced at their own shadow on a dark street and felt a flicker of unease, and the poem follows that flicker to its end. It shows how fear can be a misreading of something harmless, and how loneliness can turn that misreading into affection. It uses plain language and a simple setting to arrive at mortality, and it leaves its question unanswered, so the reader walks on under the next streetlight with it.