Scribd
Upload
577 views

"Father Returning Home" - by Dilip Chitre

The poem depicts the inner loneliness of the poet's father as an old man who is estranged from the world and alienated from his own children. It describes his daily commute home on the evening train, with soggy clothes and a worn bag of books, as he drifts past the suburbs with unseeing eyes dimmed by age. Upon returning home, he eats alone and contemplates his isolation before going to sleep with only the radio for company, dreaming of his ancestors as an invisible connection to his heritage.

Uploaded by

sarithanand
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
577 views

"Father Returning Home" - by Dilip Chitre

The poem depicts the inner loneliness of the poet's father as an old man who is estranged from the world and alienated from his own children. It describes his daily commute home on the evening train, with soggy clothes and a worn bag of books, as he drifts past the suburbs with unseeing eyes dimmed by age. Upon returning home, he eats alone and contemplates his isolation before going to sleep with only the radio for company, dreaming of his ancestors as an invisible connection to his heritage.

Uploaded by

sarithanand
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 2

Father Returning Home -by Dilip Chitre

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
Mans 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.

The poem speaks about the inner loneliness of the poets father, the utter alienation he is
experiencing in the twilight years (mans estrangement from a man-made world) as he ceases to
matter to his children who no longer share anything with him. All the while he is trying to evoke,
through the racial conscious, the invisible connection with his ancestors who had entered the
sub-continent through the Khyber Pass in the Himalayas in some distant past (the allusion is
perhaps to the migration of the Aryans to the Indian subcontinent from Central Asia).The poet
uses some fine imagery to describe the pain and misery lurking in the old mans soul as he
travels in the local train .His bag stuffed with books is falling apart refers to the state of the old
mans mind which has turned senile after all that knowledge it has acquired through years of
dedicated study.
A wonderful image is used to describe his getting down from the train: Like a word dropped
from a long sentence .The uniqueness of the image lies in the highly evocative visual picture of
an old man dropping off from the train as though he is no longer relevant to the train which will
now move forward with other people to their destinations .The old man is just a word in the
syntax of life. The sentence that is long enough to carry several words forward each contributing
to its overall meaning now drops off one stray word, which is no longer required.
The other interesting image is the eyes and vision, which occurs in the poem again and
again. The suburbs slide past his unseeing eyes is a pretty image. The second one is his eyes
dimmed by age fade homeward.
Above all we may look at the dexterous use of words to convey the twilight atmosphere in the
poem : evening train, yellow light, unseeing eyes , his eyes dimmed by age fade homeward,gray
platform.

You might also like