The poem begins with a text message and ends with the same one, and everything between is the waiting. The speaker texts someone he hasn't seen for a long time: "How long I do not see you... How long I do not meet you..." We never learn who she is or why she is gone. The poem doesn't say whether there was a quarrel, a distance or just silence, and that gap lets the ache feel familiar to anyone who has watched a phone for a reply. Its central idea is that a world full of ways to reach someone cannot make that person answer, and that loneliness can follow you through the busiest places in a city.
The first stanza is wry and sad at once. "Mobile tinkle ...messages come" gives a small burst of hope, and "expect, expect" stutters like a held breath. What arrives is a list of junk: "Ad of songs, or radio, or lottery / Or matrimony.com with special discount." The list builds with a cruel comic logic. A lottery is a gamble on a lucky chance, much like his own text, and a marriage service offered "with special discount" turns the thing he longs for into a bargain. Then comes "I feel sorrow", the shortest line in the poem. After all the cluttered detail, the flat statement lands hard.
In the second stanza the speaker draws her portrait through habits, and "You like to" returns five times. He knows that she rambles through shopping malls, eats ice-cream on the stairs of "Rabindra Sada Auditorium", and sometimes likes "to sit silently" at Esplanade Metro station listening to songs. That small, tender detail, that she is not always talkative, shows how closely he has paid attention. Judging by the place names, the setting seems to be Kolkata, though the poem never says so. The verbs are light and almost childlike ("ramble", "suck", "gossiped"). The last line, "You also like to send SMS", carries a quiet irony: she is someone who texts, yet nothing comes from her.
The third stanza turns this portrait into a copy. "I move in shopping mall by oneself / I take ice-cream by one." The activities are the same, but the pleasure has gone. She rambles and he merely "moves"; she sucks ice-cream and he "takes" it. "By oneself" and "by one" are slightly unidiomatic English, yet they work: "one" becomes almost arithmetic, one person and one ice-cream where there should be two. He adds the paintings at the Academy, a place she isn't said to love, and then he sits on the metro station chair, where she used to sit. He is not just visiting her places but trying to occupy her absence.
The form is as bare as the feeling. There is no rhyme and no regular beat, only the hesitant rhythm of speech or of a message typed in a hurry. The stanzas shrink from nine lines to eight to six, so the poem seems to run out of breath. The ellipses show him trailing off, and the unusual English ("You like to gossiped") adds to the sense of something plainly said and left unpolished. The title finally pays off in the last line: "How long I do not see you. ..and expect... if..." The word "if" is left hanging with no clause to complete it. If you answered, if you came, if anything. By repeating the opening message almost word for word, the ending suggests nothing has changed. He has walked his route and is sending the same text again.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it finds feeling in ordinary things. There are no moons or roses here, only ringtones, ice-cream, a metro seat and a marriage-site discount. The poem suggests that grief and longing now live in these everyday details. Even the repeated "How long" quietly asks two questions at once: how much time has passed, and how much longer he can bear it.