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
Of his ancestors
and grandchildren, thinking
Of nomads
entering a subcontinent through a narrow pass.
Analysis of the Poem
Father Returning Home focuses on a certain
individual, a commuting father, returning home from work in the Indian city of
Mumbai, although it could be any large city anywhere in the world.
The atmosphere within the poem, narrated by a son or
daughter, is rather gloomy and pessimistic. There is little emotion shown as
the father ends another day at work and hurries back to a house that is not
altogether a home.
Dilip Chitre, painter and film-maker as well as
poet, taps into his own father's biography and creates a powerful and imagistic
poem, the speaker closely observing the actions of the unhappy protagonist.
Purushottam Chitre, his father, is said to be the
inspiration for this poem as he migrated from his birth town of Baroda to
Mumbai to try and better his life. The poet has also been influenced by this
city:
“Mumbai figures in my early Marathi and English
poetry in different ways and at several levels. I perceived the metropolis in
juxtaposition with primordial nature as perceived in my childhood. There was a
discord. There was a sense of manmade alienation that haunted me."
In the poem life is not so easy any longer - the
father has become a figure of pathos and has lost his raison d'etre.
The major themes include:
- alienation.
- rootlessness.
- old age in a modern society.
- isolation.
- cultural identity.
- the generation gap.
- the future of the individual in the city.
Father Returning Home is a dramatic monologue, the
voice of a son or daughter detailing two scenes from the life of their father.
The opening scene, the first stanza, concentrates on
the city commute home from work, the inherent loneliness of a man who is
disillusioned with his life. The tone is a little depressing and bleak, the
language that of estrangement and detachment.
Perhaps the father has to work long hours to make
ends meet because he is on the evening train, passing through suburbs that he
takes for granted. It's been raining, the father has been soaked, and mud
stains his coat. He looks a sorry sight. Like his old bag, he's coming undone,
getting on in years.
The first person commentary continues as the father
gets off the train - Like a word dropped from a long sentence - a simile that
implies complete detachment from meaning and sense and language.
All in all, the speaker gives the reader a gloomy
introduction to their father, a microcosmic view of your typical (or atypical)
veteran male commuter. The imagery, together with a down to earth narration, is
particularly striking and creates a filmic, documentary type scenario.
In the second stanza the focus is on the domestic
side of life with family present, witnessing the sad movements of a once happy
father. The weak tea and stale chapati add to the sense of hopelessness. Is
there no wife or partner to greet him? No children to run up and hug him?
Apparently not. Here is a man who prefers books to
conversation, his own company to that of shared social space. Even on the
toilet his thoughts are negative; he cannot reconcile how a man can be a
stranger in a city teeming with millions of other men. Humans built the city,
so how come humans feel estranged in an environment that should encourage
positive interaction? Something has gone wrong.
The very thought of his own existence in such a
place affects his physicality. He trembles.
Perhaps the most devastating line in the poem is
line 20, when the reader learns that even his children (who reflect his own
personality it seems) consciously keep their jokes to themselves instead of
sharing them with their father. A truly sad situation.
The father is so far away from his current family
life he cannot seem to cope. Something is draining his spirit and there is no
one to confide in. Out of habit he puts on the radio, which is only the noise
of interference, a kind of torture. When he sleeps he dreams of the past, of
his ancestors, nomads with no static home, who overcame hardships to discover a
new land.
Further Analysis
Father Returning Home is a free verse poem, that is,
there is no set rhyme scheme and no dominant meter (metre in UK).
There are two twelve line stanzas, 24 lines in
total.
Note the use of the present
participle...Standing/unseeing/getting off/eating...
Note the use of language to convey a mood. For
example: unseeing/soggy/falling apart/
dimmed/dropped/stale/estrangement/sullen.
Enjambment is used - when a line carries on into the
next without punctuation, continuing the sense - see lines 1 - 6, 8 in first
stanza. And lines 15, 20 - 23.
The simile Like a word dropped from a long sentence
in line 9 is powerful and worth exploring.
Students! Lets listen and watch the video and discuss in the class.
HAVE A WONDERFUL WEEKEND !!!!!
.jpg)