Every working day in Balachandran V's "Sancho" begins with a small goodbye and ends with a large reunion. The poem, marked "Trivandrum 08-10-10," is about a man and his dog. Its central idea is that the daily leaving and returning is a rehearsal for the one parting that cannot be undone. The poem moves from the doorstep to infinity in six short stanzas, and it never raises its voice to do so.
The first stanza is built from the dog's body. "Head bowed, tail lowered," "slinks, dejected": the poet lets posture do the talking. "Round and round" slows the line down and imitates the circling of a dog before he lies down. It also hints at the loop of the days themselves, leaving and returning, again and again. Then comes the flattest line in the poem: "I am leaving for office." There is no feeling in it, which sets the routine human world against the dog's openly displayed sorrow. The next stanza admits the speaker's confusion. He says, "I cannot fathom his expression / But I know his sorrow," which contradicts itself in an honest, human way. He cannot read the face, yet he is sure of the feeling. The guilt shows in the line "I cannot look him in the eye, I cannot bear to," where the repeated "I cannot" almost stutters.
The evening reverses everything. The dog is "craning his neck / For a glimpse," waiting "beyond the grilled gate," and the gate matters. It is a barrier between the two of them, and opening it releases the poem's emotional climax. "Vigorously" stands alone on its own line, so the wagging tail seems to carry on after the sentence has stopped. The longest stanza follows, and its language bursts, as the speaker says: "a burst, / An explosion of joy, / Of barks, of howls, of leaps." The repeated "Of" piles the nouns up like the dog's own excitement, and "Happiness unleashed" is a neat pun, since unleashing is exactly what we imagine a dog's joy doing. The poem has no regular rhyme or metre. It is free verse, and its energy comes from repetition, from line length, and from sound, with the hard bursts of "barks" and "leaps" against the soft, lolling "shining eyes, lolling tongue."
Stanza five is the most tender. The speaker admits he is "not as adept" as the dog at showing love, and that his "words, so inadequate!" fall short. It is the only exclamation mark in the poem. He turns to what a dog understands, hugging and "smothering him with kisses." The stanza ends on two blunt words, "He knows," which settle the matter without any argument.
The last stanza changes the mood. "Later, I wonder" opens a sentence that cannot hold its shape: "what he would think, / What would the lengths, / Of the vacuum of time and space be." The grammar wobbles, and the comma after "lengths" interrupts the thought. The effect is of a mind drifting past where it can control its words. The scale jumps from a gate and a doorstep to "infinity," a cold, almost scientific phrase set against the warm domestic scenes before it. Then comes a quiet ambiguity, "I will have to leave him, / Or he, me, forever." We are not told who will go first, and "forever" closes the poem as a final, unanswered word.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. Its words are plain and its scenes ordinary, yet it faces a large truth. The dog lives wholly in the moment, in the waiting and the welcome. The man, with his language and his office, can also see ahead to the ending. The poem suggests that the dog's love is simpler and the man's more burdened, and that the man's awareness of loss is part of what makes the reunion at the gate so precious. Anyone who has been greeted at a door will recognise the scene, and the poem makes us notice what is hidden in it.