Seven short lines, one sentence, no punctuation: Ram Krishna Singh's poem is over almost before the reader has sat down, which suits a poem about time that has to be filled. The scene is simple. Some people chat, a wife murmurs, and a man scans the room. Each is occupied with something different, though they share the same space. The central idea is the quiet distance between a person and the company he is in, and in particular the poet's habit of searching any crowd for his own kind.
The syntax carries much of the meaning. The sentence opens with "While," so two simultaneous actions pile up before the main verb arrives. We sit through the talk and the murmuring, and only in line five does "he looks for some" turn the sentence toward its real subject. With no commas or full stops, the conversation and the wife's murmur run together into a steady background noise. Nobody answers anybody. The man never speaks at all. He only looks.
The diction is careful. "Love affairs and shariat" puts private scandal beside religious law, and the flat little word "and" gives them equal weight, the way careless conversation does. The spelling "shariat" suggests a South Asian setting, though the poem never says so. What matters is the register: this is talk that skips from gossip to doctrine without effort, and the speaker has no interest in it. Notice also that "they" is never named. The talkers are a faceless crowd, while the one person who looks for faces stays at a distance from them.
The wife is the most delicate figure here. Her words are reported, not quoted, and the verb "murmurs" makes them barely audible, closer to a hum than a statement. Her phrase, "arriving early," is also the poem's title, which gives it a sly irony. Arriving early is the reason the waiting hall has empty time in it at all. Whether she is fretting or complaining, the poem doesn't say, but the early arrival creates the very gap in which the man's mind wanders. Even the sound of the phrase is soft, with its rolling r and l.
Then comes the poem's oddest and funniest moment: "poetically active / faces." We say "politically active" about a person, and the borrowed construction makes poetry sound like a membership or a hobby, something one could spot in a stranger's expression. The word "faces" matters too. He looks for surfaces, not names or people, as if he might recognise a fellow poet at a glance. The modest "some" suggests he would settle for just a few. The line breaks add to the effect. "He looks for some" hangs for a moment at the line's end, and "poetically" arrives in a long, slightly pompous stretch of syllables, set against the short, plain lines around it.
There is no rhyme, and the rhythm is that of ordinary speech, with lines of roughly four to seven syllables. Yet sound does some quiet work. "Talk" in the first line and "hall" in the last share a vowel, so the chatter seems to fill the room it ends in. The poem's final words, "the waiting hall," leave us exactly where we began: still waiting. We never learn whether he finds anyone. The poem itself seems to arrive early, stopping before anything happens.
That restraint is what makes it worth reading. Singh refers to the poet as "he," not "I," so the man is seen from outside, with a gentle comic detachment. The poem neither mocks nor flatters him. It simply catches a small, honest truth: a person can sit in a room full of talk, beside someone close to him, and still be waiting for his own kind to appear. A moment most readers would dismiss as dead time becomes a sharp, brief portrait of loneliness in company.