Nobody hired the dog in Manan Das's poem, and nobody thanks him. That double neglect frames everything he does. The refrain "Nobody told him, yet / He was sincere night watcher" appears twice and sets up the poem's odd claim: the most faithful guard in the lane is the one with no master, no wage and no orders. The last line, "Nobody look after...", answers the refrain. He guards without being asked, and he dies without being cared for.
The first half builds a small, slightly comic dignity. Das borrows official language for a stray: the lane is "under his jurisdiction," and entry by "any unknown person" is "prohibited," as if the dog had posted a notice. His bark is "violent" and it "destroys" the silence, which are strong verbs for a creature that owns nothing. Against this authority the poem sets his daily life: sleeping "at the side of street or under a balcony," then wandering "from dustbin to dustbin" just "to fill one corner of belly." That last phrase is the quietest detail in the poem. A whole morning of scavenging fills only a corner of him. Hunger is his permanent condition, and Das plants it carefully before the strangers arrive.
Then the trap closes. The strangers' movements are "very suspicious," and the dog does his duty, running at them and barking. They answer with an "earnest caress" and a heap of food. An earnest caress is a performance of tenderness, and the phrase is chilling for it. The dog's reaction comes in exclamations ("So much amount and so tasteful!") that sound like his own thrilled viewpoint rather than a narrator's. The reader, already uneasy, watches him enjoy the best meal of his life. He eats "with full satisfaction" and sleeps with a "full stomach." For the first time he is completely full, and that fullness is what ends him. Das never says the food was poisoned. He lets the word "sleep" say it for him.
Sleep is the poem's hidden thread. First comes the "unworried sleep" of dawn, then "never he slept so deeply," then "eternal sleep," and finally the "calm body." Each repetition tilts the word until a comfort becomes a euphemism. Silence works the same way. The dog's bark breaks it at the start, but by the end his own silence is permanent, and the only noise is the crowd of police and neighbours.
The tenses carry the shock. The dog's routine is told in the past and habitual mode ("was prohibited," "was to fill"). "Yesterday midnight came" narrates one event. Then the poem lurches into the present: "He is now in eternal sleep," "They lift the body." The camera seems to swing suddenly to the doorway, where the householder lies "Smeared with blood." The human body gets a stretcher, a morgue and a postmortem, the whole machinery of attention. The dog, "at a little distance," gets none of it, and the closing ellipses trail off the way public concern does.
The form is free verse, without rhyme or regular metre. Lines swell and shrink with the content. The hunger passage sprawls and spills over its line break ("late / morning"), while the violence is delivered in fragments. The diction is plain and sometimes unidiomatic ("Their movement were very suspicious"), which gives the poem the flat tone of a witness statement rather than ornamental verse, and that restraint keeps the ending from turning into sentimentality.
What makes the poem worth reading is its irony. The people the dog protects never fed him, and the only ones who ever did were the people he tried to stop. His hunger, not his failure, is what is exploited. Das also calls him a "hearty watcher," a word that suggests warmth as well as vigour, and he never blames the dog for the householder's death. The poem asks, quietly, who in this neighbourhood was actually keeping watch, and whose death anyone noticed.