Everything in Ram Krishna Singh's «Who Cares» hangs on its first word. "Because you didn't come" promises a cause, and the rest of the poem is the effect: a man drinking alone, killing ants, and failing to be comforted by anything. The explanation is never given a grand scale. An absent visitor is enough to unravel an evening, and the poem is honest about how small and how total that unraveling feels.
The ants are the most unsettling detail. "I drank alone and killed / several black ants" is delivered in a flat, almost bookkeeping tone. "Several" is a casual, uncounted number, as if the killing barely registers. Yet the line break after "killed" gives the verb a hard stop before we learn what the victims are. The violence is tiny and displaced: the speaker cannot hurt the person who stayed away, or the loneliness itself, so he hurts what is nearby and powerless. The ants also work as a quiet contrast. They are creatures that live in crowds and colonies, and he is one man at a table. Killing them may be his clumsy way of punishing company he doesn't have.
The next lines widen the circle of failure. "My own nightly nemesis" is a deliberately inflated phrase, and its target is ambiguous. A reader might take it as the television, which follows in the next line, but "nightly" suggests something broader, such as insomnia, drinking, or the habit of waiting. The grand word "nemesis" sits beside the shabby setting, which gives the poem a self-mocking humor. Then the sentences begin to lose their verbs: "TV no solace / nor the standup comedy." The grammar is as stripped down as the mood. Standup comedy is meant to produce laughter on demand, so its failure here is the sharper joke. The sensex, India's stock-market index, "fell further," and the poem seems to suggest an urban, middle-class setting where public news arrives as background noise. The lowercase "sensex" and the casual "further" make the national economy sound like one more thing going downhill that night. The speaker's private slump and the public one are lined up side by side, and neither is allowed to matter more.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no punctuation at all. Lines are short, mostly a handful of syllables, and they break in awkward places ("thinking about you and / my own"), so the thoughts seem to trail off mid-breath. There is no full stop to let the speaker rest, which suits an evening that just slides on. Small sound patterns surface without being forced: the n-sounds of "nightly nemesis" and the repeated f in "fell further," which almost enacts the fall. The last two lines stretch longer than the rest, as though the speaker's control is loosening as he drinks.
The ending carries the poem's real turn. "Who cares for me or the spark / you thought I had but who cares." The phrase "who cares" first means "who looks after me, who loves me." When it repeats at the end, it becomes a shrug: it doesn't matter, I don't care. The same words move from longing to defensive bravado in a single line, and the bravado is not convincing. The "spark" is also worth noticing. It is something the absent person once believed in, and "thought" is past tense and doubtful, so the speaker no longer trusts that he has it. Against the dead ants and the dull glow of the TV screen, the spark stands for vitality and the self he fears he has lost.
What makes the poem worth reading is how little it explains and how much it lets us infer. It never says the speaker is heartbroken or lonely. It lists a bad night, and the list does the confessing. The humor keeps self-pity at arm's length, but the title and the repeated refrain show that the question is a real one. Its answer is quietly left open, though the poem itself, by recording the night so carefully, does the caring the speaker says nobody does.