Father Returning Home by Dilip Chitre

The Poem: 

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
Of his ancestors and grandchildren, thinking
Of nomads entering a subcontinent through a narrow pass.

Dilip Chitre (1938-2009)

Summary and Analysis:

Dilip Chitre is an important  post-independence India poet. He was bilingual and wrote in Marathi as well as English. This poem is presumably set in Mumbai, and in keeping with the rest of this list of poems under CIE 0486 syllabus, is about love – in this case, familial love.

In the first stanza, the father is commuting home after work, and he presents a pathetic sight. He is on board a ‘late evening’ train, and the implication of the end of the day sets the tone for the theme of the irrelevancy and maltreatment of elderly people in the rest of the poem. The train ride seems to have an oppressive atmosphere, the commuters are not chatting happily away – instead, they are all estranged from each other and are ‘silent’ on this long commute home. The lighting is depressing, a ‘yellow light’ shines on the commuters, leaving a sense of the lack of maintenance and care of the train that echoes the poem’s theme of the neglect of the elderly. The description of the father’s eyes as ‘unseeing’ draws attention to the poignant fact that he is estranged from life itself. Instead of understanding that the father is simply ‘blind’ to life, the adjective ‘unseeing’ reminds readers that the father once ‘saw’ life, and it is only old age that has undone that ability to ‘see’ or engage with life.

The father is the picture of an uncared for person. His clothes are ‘soggy’, wet from the rain, and his raincoat is not just wet, but ‘stained with mud’, as if his state is always worse for wear. His bag is ‘stuffed with books’ tells us that he is a person who thirsts for knowledge and has an enthusiasm for life at least in respect of books. Yet the bag that holds these books is ‘falling apart’, and we understand from this, that even one of the core interests in his life is not keeping him together. The enjambement of ‘stuffed with books//is falling apart’ neatly conveys the precarious state of the books, that they are nearly about to fall out of the bag.

The key line in the latter half of this stanza is ‘like a word dropped from a long sentence’. This is a line that vividly relates the irrelevancy and insignificance of the elderly father to the world. In the process of trimming down a long sentence, one has to make the value judgment of which words are not essential to the meaning and structure of the sentence, and accordingly, delete those words from the sentence. Likewise, in the hierarchy of social structure, there are only a certain sector of the population, or certain people, who are considered essential the meaning and structure of the community, and in this poem, the elderly, or at least, the father figure, is not one of them. He is annexed from the sector of the population considered essential.

Against these immeasurable, oppressive forces, the contrast of the futility of the father’s determination in ‘hurrying onward’ despite sandals that are ‘sticky with mud’ shows up the poignancy of society’s abandonment of its elderly population.

In the second stanza, the setting changes to the father and speaker’s home. Again, the picture presented is of a neglected person – after a long journey home, the father doesn’t enjoy hot tea or tasty food, but instead drinks ‘weak tea’, and a ‘stale chapati’. Instead of being greeted by welcoming company, his companionship comes in the form of  a ‘book’.

The disorder of his life is also shown up by the choice of his place for contemplation about life – the toilet. The place where humans go to dispose of bodily waste, to put it politely. It’s almost as if he doesn’t even have respect for his own philosophical musings to find a more dignified place to do his thinking. ‘Man’s estrangement from a man-made world’ is a powerful line. It presents to us the paradox that this world and its social hierarchies and structures are created by man, but men do not look out for all of its own kind, and so the world that man created is also the world that neglects much of the population of men. (If you’re being pedantic about technical words in the GCSE exam, you could talk about the repetition of word ‘man’)

His physical fragility is conveyed by the image of him ‘trembling’ at the sink, and the rest of the stanza speaks of the old man’s immeasurable loneliness.

Even his closest kin – his children, reject his presence and his mind. They do not share their life with him or trust him with their personal ‘secrets’. At the arrival of bedtime, he is content with the ‘static’ of the radio, instead of genuine programmes on the radio. This is reflective of his life in general, as portrayed in the poem. He does not get the fulfilling version of life that everyone else who can tune into radio programmes do, but he is still content with the dysfunctional version of life that he receives.

The last two clauses of the poem are very poignant though. They do not point to the discontent or complaints that the old man has about the broken life that he leads. Instead, they point to the escape methods that the old man has – he escapes into his own mental world of ancestry, drama and grandeur. Despite the cruelty he has been shown, and the total collapse of a functional life, the elderly father has the bravery to find solace in creating his own mental drama and world.