Nobody opens a poem about the environment by splashing water over his genitals, and that is why Balachandran V's "Fish out of Water" works. The speaker is hot, sweaty and unembarrassed. He wets his armpits and the nape of his neck, then, "shameless," the rest of himself. He lies naked on the bed, farting and sighing, "happy." The comedy is deliberate. It makes us trust him, because he admits to bodily discomfort most poems would politely skip.
The first stanza spreads the heat outward. The dogs lie "legs up in the air, / Too tired to smell the wind." A dog that can't be bothered to sniff is a precise image of exhaustion, since smelling is what dogs do almost without thinking. The whole household has been flattened. The second stanza moves to pleasure, but even that goes slightly wrong: the speaker "chokes" at the chilled lemonade "gurgling down my throat." The word "gurgling" lets us hear the drink, and "choke" suggests that relief, taken too greedily, is not entirely safe.
Then the crow arrives. It dips its beak, "then jumps / Into the clay pan, splashing in the water." The line break after "jumps" makes the reader leap too. The crow does without embarrassment what the speaker only does indoors, and the scene is full of small tactile details: the clay pan, the portico, the bird's quick decision. The speaker, a little envious, imagines going further. "I wish I were a fish, / Swishing my tail, chilling / With the mermaids." Here the language becomes playful. "Swishing" echoes the earlier "splash" and "sweat," and "chilling" does double duty as slang for relaxing and as a literal word for cold water. This is the daydream of a person who has had enough.
The poem turns on two small words: "But then." Everything cheerful before this point is quietly undercut: "the fish are dying / And the birds and bees too." The list matters. We have just watched a bird enjoy a bath, so the dying birds are no abstraction; they are the crow's relatives. The poem never names a cause, but the opening heat, which seemed only an inconvenience, now looks like a symptom. That is an inference, though a reasonable one, since the poem lets the sweat and the dying creatures sit side by side without explanation.
The title carries the same double meaning. A "fish out of water" is someone uncomfortable in the wrong surroundings, which describes the sweating speaker perfectly. But the phrase also hints at the real danger: fish literally removed from their element. The joke at the start becomes the warning at the end without the words changing.
Structurally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme, and its short, plain lines sound like someone talking to himself. The three stanzas shrink in confidence: eight lines of scene-setting, five of observation, six of wish and warning. The final line is the starkest: "Soon, we too would, for sure." The commas break it into small, halting pieces, and "for sure" is casual, almost shrugging, which makes it more chilling than a dramatic phrase would be. Notice also the shift in pronouns. The poem is full of "I" until the last line, when the speaker says "we." The private body in a hot room becomes the whole species.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal to lecture. It makes no speeches about nature and offers no solutions. It gives us a man, a crow, some tired dogs and a glass of lemonade, and trusts that the last three lines will do their work. Because we have laughed with the speaker first, the ending lands harder. For a student reader, it shows how humour can be a way into a serious subject, and how a poem can be both a small domestic scene and a quiet alarm.