Most poems about fatherhood take inventory of what a man has. Balachandran V's "Sunlight Slants" takes inventory of what is missing. It opens in pride: a son who is his father's "spitting image," "torchbearer of my life." But the pride has a defensive edge. The boy is "the proof my manhood," and the speaker insists he is "still man enough" for "another progeny." That word is stiff and almost clinical, and it sits oddly beside what he wants a second child for: "A friend for my son to play with, / A heart for him to confide in." The poem never says why that child did not come. It offers only a grim generalisation, "You take a decision, once and forever," and the sudden "you" suggests a speaker who cannot quite say "I" about this. The cost shows through the son, who has stopped asking "Why too can't I have one?" but whose question survives as a shadow that "still flits in his eyes."
That shadow is the hinge of the poem. The verb returns a few lines later, when the father sees "a shadow flitting by" in the corner of his eye. The boy's wish for a sibling and the father's wish for a daughter turn out to be one haunting, passed between them. When the apparition arrives, it is built from small domestic things: a ponytail, raindrops on petals, a pinafore hung "in the sun to dry," water dripping from wet hair. The pinafore is an empty garment, so the child is present only through traces, like footprints. Then the poem works through the senses one at a time: anklets tinkle, laughter tingles, love has a scent, curls tickle his ears. Sight is the one sense left out. When her hands cover his eyes in the old guessing game ("tell her name"), he is literally blind, and the line "My fingers grope for your little face" is the most painful in the poem. He can imagine every detail except the face, and he cannot win her game because there is no name to give. That is why she is his "unsung song," a tune that never got its words.
The form supports this. The poem is free verse with no fixed rhyme scheme, in plain, mostly end-stopped lines of roughly ten syllables, like a man talking quietly to a friend. The opening section is rhymeless and prosy. Rhyme creeps in only as the daydream takes over: "eye," "by" and "dry" chime within four lines, and the closing lines settle on "here" and "thee." Music arrives with the child. The triplet "The tinkle of your anklets, / The tingle of your laughter" uses repetition and sound-echo so that the phrase itself seems to jingle. The poem's one metaphor of regret, "Life isn't a reel, can't play back at whim," is deliberately ordinary, as if the speaker has no poetry to spare for his own mistake.
Register shifts near the end. "Thee" pushes everyday speech toward prayer, and the speaker stops explaining and starts inviting. There is also a small, telling reversal in "Why did you chose to remain in my heart." Earlier a decision was taken; now the child is the one who "chose." The poem suggests, though it never says so, a wish to soften an old guilt by giving the missing child some of the agency. Readers should also know that the language wobbles in places ("I don't how I were," "hide& seek"), and these lines read more like slips than design. The feeling comes through regardless.
The title image carries the closing. "Sunlight slants" is late-day light, the day nearly done, and "evening is here" quietly admits that time is running out. Yet the doors are open, and the speaker asks the light to "Glow your hair," which recalls the wet hair drying in the sun, so the poem ends where the vision began.
The poem's significance lies in what it chooses to mourn. A loss with no funeral, no name and no record is easy to leave unspoken, and the poem gives it a doorway, a hairstyle and a laugh instead. It does not pretend the choice can be undone. It lets a father admit that love can be felt for someone who never existed.