Before the reader sees anything in this poem, they hear it: "the drumming of the ball on the concrete floor," then the "yelps and shouts" of children. Balachandran V puts sound first, the way a morning arrives for someone still half asleep. When the speaker lifts the curtain, even sight comes filtered "through the haze of the mosquitoe net." He is watching from behind layers of cloth and distance, and that position matters later. The line beneath the title, "Alleppey, 29.09.2011," gives the poem the feel of a dated diary entry, a moment caught and signed.
The poem is free verse, with no rhyme and no fixed line length, and that suits its subject. The second stanza is one long, breathless run of participles: "Dribbling," "turning, twisting, ducking," "Blocking, trying to snatch." Few of the lines stop for breath, so the reader is carried along the way the players are carried across the court. The similes come from the animal world. The children are "like antelopes in the savannah," then "like cats / On a hot tin roof." The second is a well-worn phrase, but it earns its place here, because it captures bodies that cannot keep still. The sound work tightens at the stanza's end: "Alert, agile, acutely aware" stacks its stressed a-sounds like quick passes. The stanza ends on "playing to win," and that phrase sets up what follows.
The third stanza is where the poem turns. "How wonderful it is to be young" is the nearest the speaker comes to speaking out loud, and the exclamation is warm and unguarded. But his thoughts then move from the court to life itself: "Games, how many, of how many kinds, yet to play and to win." The word "yet" puts those games in the children's future. Then comes the triple "Some to lose, some to be remembered, some to be forgotten." The children are playing to win, but the speaker already knows that winning is only one of the outcomes waiting for them. The pattern is gentle, but it undercuts the brightness of the stanza before it.
In the last stanza the speaker "turn[s] around and stand[s] still." His stillness contrasts with their motion, and he shifts from watching to listening. Then the opening sound returns, changed: the ball's thud is now "like the thudding of my heart." A sound that was drumming at the start has become a pulse. The grammar shifts as well. The children were the subjects of active verbs earlier, but the ball is now "Thudding, bouncing, thrown, captured and released to the air." Those passive participles describe something handled by forces outside itself, and the speaker seems to be thinking of a life in the same terms. "The final whistle" and the setting sun then turn the game into a lifespan. The last sentence hangs on the word "and" at the end of a line, and then "Darkness envelopes my life" arrives. "Envelopes" suggests wrapping, which is softer and quieter than a violent ending. Judging by this ending, the speaker is thinking about the end of his own life, and he does so calmly.
What makes the poem worth reading is how little it has to do to get there. It has no elaborate ornament and no argument. It has one ordinary scene, one repeated sound, and a speaker who lets that sound change meaning as he listens. The children hear a ball and the speaker hears his own heartbeat, and the poem leaves both readings standing. It does not mourn youth or begrudge it. It praises the players' "boundless energy, radiating health," and still admits that the same game, seen from behind a curtain at the other end of a life, is a rehearsal for how everything finishes. A morning scene becomes a quiet meditation on time, and the poem manages this without raising its voice.