Dilip Chitre’s “Father Returning Home” (1980) explores the complicated relationship between a grown man and his emotionally unavailable father. In recreating what the grown son imagines was the daily grind of the father’s long commute to and from work, the son captures the isolation and loneliness of a gentle father who worked to provide for his family at the expense of bonding with them in any meaningful way. On a broader level, however, the poem uses the distance between the father and grown son to suggest the alienation and anxiety at the heart of India’s postcolonial culture.

Chitre (1938-2009) was known as one of postcolonial India’s most respected artists, a prolific and versatile poet as well as an expressionist painter and an avant-garde filmmaker. Although Chitre was principally known for his poetry published in his native Marathi language, spoken by nearly one-third of India’s population, “Father Returning Home” appeared in Chitre’s only English-language volume, Traveling in a Cage.

In his works, Chitre investigated themes that define “Father Returning Home”: the ennui and discontent of the contemporary wasteland world; the heart-wrenching emotional distance between generations; and ultimately the consolation the grown son finds in bonding with his father imaginatively through the vehicle of art itself.

Poet Biography

Dilip Chitre (DAY-leep CHI-trah) was born September 17, 1938, in Vadodara, a town along the west coast of India. For Chitre, it was an idyllic world close to nature. His father, a publisher, printer, and amateur book collector, educated his son in both verbal and visual languages. Not only was young Chitre an eager reader, but he also assisted his father in his print shop, mixing colors and experimenting with the shapes and textures of images.

When Chitre was a teenager, however, his father relocated the family to the megacity of Mumbai about 300 miles south of Vadodara in the hopes of finding better work. Times were difficult. The change was dramatic and sapped the energy of Chitre’s father, recounted in “Father Returning Home.” Chitre focused on writing poetry because it was less expensive than art. He completed his studies at a public college and began working as a journalist, moving into advertising after he married. He never abandoned his interest in both painting and poetry, maintaining ties with Mumbai’s flourishing underground arts community. Chitre published his first volume of poetry, in Marathi, in 1960.

In 1975, on the strength of several volumes of poetry, Chitre accepted an invitation to the International Writers Program at the University of Iowa. His time in America widened his perspectives. When he returned, in addition to writing poetry, Chitre wrote film scripts, translated classic Indian poetry into his Marathi language, completed a series of expressionist paintings that explored dimensions of color and shape (what he called “oscillations”), and taught popular workshops on Indian languages and culture.

Impacted by the catastrophic 1984 chlorine gas leak at the industrial facility outside Bhopal, Chitre relocated his family to Pune in west central India. He continued to work. In 1994, Chitre was awarded India’s most coveted annual literary prize, the Sahitya Akamemi Award, in two separate fields—translation work and original poetry. That dual recognition was unprecedented. Chitre died on December 10, 2009, after a protracted battle with liver cancer.

Poem text

Chitre, Dilip. “Father Returning Home.” 1980. Poetry Nook.

Summary

“Father Returning Home” is a frame narrative, a story told by a speaker who acts as an unnamed narrator, an adult looking back on his years growing up. The poem fuses recollections with imaginative recreations as the grown child attempts to understand the emotional life of his aging father.

This grown child first imagines his father returning home in the “late evening” (Line 1) after a day’s work in the city. It is another humid summer night, monsoon season, and the rain is pouring. The father travels home to the suburbs on a commuter train. He is packed in with other commuters.

As the train moves out of the city, the man, tired and listless, seems in a daze, his eyes “unseeing” (Line 3). His clothes reflect his long walk to the station in the rain. His shirt and pants are “soggy” (Line 4) and his raincoat is spattered with mud. Even his tattered briefcase stuffed with books is soaked.

The now-grown child imagines his father then getting off the train, unmissed and unnoticed by the other commuters, leaving them behind like a “word dropped from a long sentence” (Line 9). The father hurries home not because he anticipates his homecoming but rather because of the steady rain. He moves quickly through the narrow, congested streets, his boots (or “chappals”) “sticky with mud” (Line 12).

The son imagines that, once home, the father brews his evening tea, watery and thin. It is late. The family has already eaten. Without greeting his family, the father eats alone, an unspectacular meal of stale flatbread (“chapati” [Line 14]). Alone at the kitchen table, he reads a book.

After dinner, he heads to the bathroom. The grown child imagines his father, while on the toilet, thinking deep and existential thoughts that reflect his father’s extensive reading, big questions about alienation and spiritual isolation, about “man’s estrangement from a man-made world” (Line 16).

As the father washes his hands in the sink’s cold water, his hands tremble, and he notes the “greying hair” (Line 19) on his wrists, reminders of his advancing age. For a moment, he considers how he no longer engages with his children, now teenagers. They are “sullen” (Line 20), moody, and distant. He knows they keep secrets from him now and they no longer all laugh together. They no longer share jokes.

The grown child then imagines his father heading off to bed. The father would switch on the cheap radio on his bedside table, content with the static to ease the oppressive silence, too tired to fiddle with the dial. The adult child imagines that his father, knowing that he must get up in a few hours and repeat the same dreary day, seeks the solace of dreams of “his ancestors and his grandchildren” (Line 23). He might dream, if he is fortunate, grand dreams of his adventuring ancestors, wandering “nomads” (Line 24), who, centuries earlier, had heroically crossed the narrow passes of forbidding mountains to find a home, a new life here. Perhaps, however, the father’s dreams will console the adult child with the fragile promise of his as-yet-unborn grandchildren.