Father Returning Home is a poem written by Dilip Chitre.

The main idea of this poem is 'Man's estrangement from a man-made world'. Here the father comes home late tired with his pants are soggy and his black raincoat is stained with mud and his bag is falling apart-He never cares the scenes of the outer world when he travels. Because he is always musing about his family. He is so true about his family, yet no one in his family realizes his care for them. He gets only the weak tea and stale chapati. (Look, he is the only one who works hard for his family yet he does not get even good food.)

The lines like 'The cold water running over his brown hands, A few droplets cling to the greying hairs on his wrists' are used to add to the effect of the life and the world of poor father. His children are not ready to share jokes with him-their sullenness shows the unspoken resentment. And finally, even when he goes to bed the story is not different. There he receives only noised receiving, not even a good program from the radio. In short the father has no joy in his life; there is no closeness between the father and the children. The only thing that changes the mood of the poem is when he thinks about his dead yesterdays (ancestors) and unborn tomorrows (grand-children and nomads) -Here one thing must be noted that he dreams about these people not about his own children. Patel wanted to convey the idea of unseen sincerity of millions of fathers who strive hard for their family and their people. Dilip Purushottam Chitre (17 September 1938 10 December 2009) was one of the foremost Indian writers and critics to emerge in the post Independence India. Apart from being a very important bilingual writer, writing in Marathi and English, he was also a painter and filmmaker.

He was born in Baroda on 17 September 1938 into a Marathi speaking CKP community. His father Purushottam Chitre used to publish a periodical named Abhiruchi which was highly treasured for its high, uncompromising quality. Dilip Chitre's family moved to Mumbai in 1951 and he published his first collection of poems in 1960. He was one of the earliest and the most important influences behind the famous "little magazine movement" of the sixties in Marathi. He started Shabda with Arun Kolatkar and Ramesh Samarth. In 1975, he was awarded a visiting fellowship by the International Writing Programme of the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa in the United States. He has also worked as a director of the Indian Poetry Library, archive, and translation centre at Bharat Bhavan, a multi arts foundation. He also convened a world poetry festival in New Delhi followed by an international symposium of poets in Bhopal.

rPj for English Project