A siren is usually something we hear and forget. In Balachandran V's "Through the Window," the sound comes so often that it stops being news and becomes a record of other people's disasters. Finally it becomes a question about the listener's own. The poem is dated Trivandrum, 21 March 2009, and its autorickshaws and crowded traffic suggest an Indian city. It never explains why so many ambulances pass this particular window, and it doesn't need to.
The poem is really about how the speaker's response changes. Twice he says "In the beginning," and each time the phrase marks a different stage of the same habit. First he "used to get up / And look out," a curious bystander. Later he "used to sit back / With a heavy heart." By the last lines his attention has turned inward. Reminded "of my own mortality," he strains his ears "for that wailing at my doors." The sound that began outside the window ends at his own threshold, and the plural "doors" makes the threat feel like it could come from anywhere.
The poem is in free verse, with no rhyme and no regular metre. Its stanzas run five, six, ten, two and five lines, and the unevenness suits a subject that arrives without warning. Sound shapes the rhythm from the start. "Some would be urgent, short and rapid" moves in clipped beats, while the next line, "Some long-drawn, slow, as if it knows," stretches out to match. That "as if it knows / It wouldn't make any difference anymore" gives the siren a weary intelligence, resigned to its own uselessness. The word "wailing" also belongs to human grief, so the machine and the mourner begin to merge. The opening sentence ("No longer have I settled down on my seat / The wailing would ensue") reads like "no sooner," and its cause-and-effect snap suggests an inevitability: sit down, and the sound begins.
The imagery is precise and unsentimental. The ambulances carry "the mirror image / Of AMBULANCE." That is the reversed lettering painted on the front so that drivers ahead can read it in their mirrors. It is a sharp, ordinary detail, and it also hints at what the poem does. The speaker watches strangers and ends up seeing himself. His language at first is a spectator's: the vehicles are "offering me glimpses," and the autorickshaws "offered the best view." The speaker admits "I was fascinated," and that honesty keeps the poem from coldness. He doesn't pretend his looking was noble.
The third stanza, the longest, is built like a series of snapshots. "Lights blazing, horn blaring" doubles the noise in its sounds, and "squeezing out, weaving" pushes through the traffic. Then the lines slow to a stop on the injured passenger: "Blood-spattered dress, blood-streaked face / Closed eyes." These fragments have no verbs, as if the speaker had no time to describe more than a glance. The enjambment of "head leaning on / To another's shoulder" makes the line itself lean. His attention then shifts from the victim to the companions, and a list of "of" phrases builds up: "vacant, sometimes anxious, / Of flickering fear, of untold sorrow and submission to fate." The last phrase, "submission to fate," sums up the scene's passivity.
The fourth stanza is only two lines. Ambulances now carry "a wreath or two," and they are "solemn, slow," so speed gives way to stillness. The closing line, "Everything has to come to a pass," echoes the idiom "come to pass," and I read "pass" here as also meaning a passing away. It also quietly answers the earlier "flash past." It sounds like a proverb offered as comfort, but the next stanza shows that the comfort doesn't work: the heavy heart comes straight back.
The poem is significant for what it declines to do. It has no dramatic accident and no lecture on mortality. It uses plain words, a repeated phrase and one ordinary window to show how awareness of death can slip in through routine. It also gently questions the ethics of looking, since the person who "enjoyed the best view" finally becomes the one who listens for the sound at his own door.