Anyone who has ridden a bike through a crowded city knows the feeling Balachandran V catches in "City Rider": being squeezed through a gap that never quite widens. The poem is dated Trivandrum, 23 September 2010. It runs to just fourteen lines in two stanzas of seven, yet it travels from claustrophobia to something close to joy in a single ride.
The first stanza is built to make us feel trapped. It opens with "Twisting and turning / Speeding and slowing." Each line pairs two present participles, and the second pair sets opposites against each other, so the rhythm lurches the way traffic does. The repeated "t" sounds in "twisting and turning" add a jerky, stuttering texture. The sentence also refuses to resolve. It stacks up phrases ("Through the labyrinth of streets / Braving the noise, the crowds / Boxed in by tall buildings") and only reaches its subject and verb in line six: "The bike rushes." The grammar is boxed in, just as the rider is. Then the line snaps off at a dash after "escape", and the stanza ends on two clipped words, "Suffocated, nearly strangled." The "nearly" suggests the exaggeration of someone fed up rather than in real danger, though that is a reading of tone, not something the poem states.
It is the bike that rushes "as if to escape", not the rider. The poem never says "I" and never describes the person at all. The machine becomes a creature bolting from a trap, and the human disappears inside it. This makes the experience feel like anyone's, even though the title promises a rider.
The second stanza loosens at once. "It climbs a flyover" is short and plain, with its verb right at the front, after all that waiting. "Higher, over the lowly lot" brings softer, liquid "l" sounds. "Lot" is a slippery word here, since it could mean the crowd, the cramped ground or simply the ordinary run of things below. Whichever we hear, "lowly" gives the rider a faintly triumphant view from above.
Next comes the first living thing in the poem that isn't struggling: "A blooming Gulmohar / By the side, smiling." Readers who know the tree will recall its flame-red blossom, a colour the poem leaves unnamed but which would burst against the concrete and noise of the first stanza. The personification is gentle. After a stanza of being strangled, the city finally shows a friendly face, and it belongs to a tree.
The ending is the most carefully controlled part. "And then – a patch of sky –" uses dashes again, but now they frame an opening instead of cutting a line off. The lines shrink to "Bright, white", two beats that feel like squinting into sudden glare. Then the eye travels on: "And farther, a deep blue." Colour arrives in the last lines, after a stanza with almost none, and "farther" gives the view depth and distance. Even so, the sky is only "a patch", glimpsed above the rooftops, so the escape is partial. The poem finishes with no verb and no full stop, leaving the view open. We never see the rider come back down.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The poem is free verse, held together by its mirrored seven-line stanzas, its present-tense momentum and the shift from long, clogged phrases to short, clear ones. The diction is everyday, which suits a subject as ordinary as a commute.
What makes the poem worth reading is how fairly it treats the city. The flyover is as human-made as the "tall buildings", so the same city that boxes the rider in also builds the ramp up and out. The poem doesn't turn urban life into a villain. It shows how relief can arrive in glimpses, such as a smiling tree or a patch of blue, and it suggests that noticing them is a skill. Its small scale is part of its point: a few seconds on a flyover are enough to change how a whole journey feels.