read father returning home dilip chitre

Dilip Chitre | Father Returning Home | Poem and Biography

Dilip Chitre (b. 1938) was educated in Baroda and Mumbai. He has been a teacher, painter, film-maker and magazine columnist. A winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award, Chitre has lived and taught in Ethiopia and the USA and was invited to participate in the Iowa University International Writing Programme. He is a bilingual writer and writes mostly in Marathi. His major translations (from Marathi into English) include An Anthology of Marathi Poetry, (1945-1965) and Says Tuka (1991). Travelling in a Cage (1980) is his first and only book of English poems. Exile, alienation, self- disintegration and death are the major themes in Chitre's poetry. It belongs essentially to the Modernist Movement, as it reflects cosmopolitan culture, an urban sensibility, uses oblique expressions and ironic tones.

'Father Returning Home', selected from Travelling in a Cage, is a deftly drawn word portrait of a commuter and his dull, drab and exhausting daily routine. Forced to return to stale food and painful isolation at home, the pathetic old man has no choice but to talk to himself. He is delinked from the present, including his family, and can only communicate with the buried past and unborn future dreaming about his ancestors and grandchildren. Characteristically, the poem is totally devoid of sentimentality despite its tender subject. The evocative imagery, subtle irony and the symbolic projection of the commuter as a modern nomad are the major devices which reinforce the theme of man's estrangement from a man-made world.

Father Returning Home

My father travels on the late evening train 

 

Standing among silent commuters in the yellow light

Suburbs slide past his unseeing eyes

His shirt and pants are soggy and his black raincoat 

 

Stained with mud and his bag stuffed with books

Is falling apart. His eyes dimmed by age

Fade homeward through the humid monsoon night.

Now I can see him getting off the train

Like a word dropped from a long sentence.

He hurries across the length of the grey platform,

Crosses the railway line, enters the lane, 

His chappals are sticky with mud, but he hurries onward.

 

Home again, I see him drinking weak tea, 

 

Eating a stale chapati, reading a book. 

 

He goes into the toilet to contemplate 

 

Man's estrangement from a man-made world. 

 

Coming out he trembles at the sink, 

 

The cold water running over his brown hands, 

 

A few droplets cling to the greying hairs on his wrists. 

 

His sullen children have often refused to share 

 

Jokes and secrets with him. He will now go to 

 

sleep Listening to the static on the radio, dreaming 

 

Ofhis ancestors and grandchildren, thinking 

 

Of nomads entering a subcontinent through a narrow pass.