Three hundred and sixty is a number that sounds like a score, and that is how the loco pilot in Balachandran V's poem first offers it. The version here is marked Trivandrum, 01.08.2009. Two boyhood friends meet after more than forty years. Over whiskey and cigarettes, one of them, now a train driver, tallies the people who have died under his engine. The other, the narrator, mostly listens. The central idea is the weight of a role nobody chose to make deadly. The pilot has broken no law, yet he calls his life a record of killing. The poem asks where responsibility sits when a man can only keep the train moving.
His chosen word is "kills," and his insistence on it ("Mind you, kills") is telling. It is a hunter's word, hard and exact, and he uses it like a man who has decided not to soften anything. Yet he admits he does not count "the mutilated, the disabled, the living dead." That phrase returns later as "my deadened mind," and it hints that the pilot belongs to the same company. The dead are not the only casualties.
The poem then turns away from his words to the view outside the window. The river "roared," the birds "sang," the wind "ran helter-skelter," and the sun "scattered golden light as it sank." These are lively, almost playful verbs, and they come straight after the glimmer of tears. The landscape is beautiful and entirely indifferent, and the final verb, "sank," quietly lowers the mood again.
The narrator's memories add a second layer. His childhood is full of possessions and protected creatures: the bungalow, the dogs, the "little deer," the metal school box, the apples and chocolates, a father who was "the big officer of Forests." The friend, who "tagged behind" in awe, now remembers it all. "How sharply does he remember!" reads like surprise, perhaps tinged with discomfort. The poem never states the gap between the boys, but it lets it sit there. One grew up among sheltered animals, and the other grew up to run down human beings he could not save.
The most disturbing passages are the pilot's descriptions. He lists the ways people come to the track: head-on, lying down, walking away from the train. Then he singles out the woman who stood in the headlight with palms joined, "a last and final bow to me, her killer." The gesture of respect makes the horror worse, because it hands him a guilt he never asked for. His language is strangely gentle. The impact is "a soft thud, like a loving pat," and the dead are "ushered" into the netherworld, as if he were a host at a door. The tenderness reads as a defence, a way of surviving the work. A brief line about dreading "the next after / The public exam results come" points to a social cause behind some of the deaths without lecturing about it.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme, in stanzas of four or five lines. The quotation marks tell us that most of it is spoken, and phrases like "you know" and "you see" keep the rhythm of a real confession, uneven and halting. "We have to move on, you see" works on two levels. It is a fact of mechanics, since the diesels cannot stop suddenly, and it is a bleak comment on how the pilot must live with what he has seen. Then comes "Not even a silent prayer," which could mean he is helpless, or that he has run out of belief, or both.
The ending is spare. The cigarette burns down "to his fingertips" and he does not seem to notice, which shows how numb he has become. His last statement is short and flat: "All I know is to drive trains – / And to kill people." The dash holds the pause before the harsh half of the sentence, and there is no comfort afterwards.
The poem is significant because it gives a face to a statistic and a job that most of us never think about. It does not defend or accuse the pilot, and it leaves the narrator's reaction unspoken. The reader is left to feel how heavily one man's blameless life can weigh on him.