The final tercet is where the poem earns its title. “My regret is the furniture / of an English room.” Regret here is not an emotion; it is a physical space. It is solid, wooden, heavy—Victorian. Regret is the chair you sit in every day.
The hour of my return to the soil of my birth is lost in the shifting dunes of time. regret poem by r parthasarathy
The regret, then, is that his authentic pain (Tamil) is rendered invisible by the very environment (London) that allows him to speak. The final tercet is where the poem earns its title
To read this poem is to understand that regret is not the opposite of joy. It is the shadow of consciousness. And for Parthasarathy, standing in the London rain, wearing his borrowed tie, regret becomes the only honest furniture he owns. Regret is the chair you sit in every day