Summary and Analysis of Father Returning Home by Dilip Chitre

Stanza 1: The first stanza of Father Returning Home describes the train journey of his father while
returning home one evening. The father stands among commuters in the yellow light of a local
compartment. The poet describes his father’s reaction against the sights of the suburbs that pass by. His
father remains unmoved by the sights because they are too familiar to him. That is quite normal, isn’t
it? We hardly pay attention to those places where we travel every day, unless the place has something
interesting to offer. Same was with the poet’s father.

The poet then describes his father’s pathetic condition, as he travels during the rainy season. His
clothes become damp and dirty. The black raincoat that he wears becomes stained with mud. His bag
crumbles with the heavy load of the books.Due to old age, the poet’s father’s eyesight has become poor
and therefore he finds difficulty to move about in the dark.

The poet says that he can see his father getting down the train ‘like a word dropped from a long
sentence.’ The sentence is highly unique and it provides an evocative image of an old man who gets
down from the train as if he is no longer relevant to it. The poet then sees his father hurrying through
the long, grey platform.

The man seems to be as old as the platform, who has been using it as a part of his routine. He crosses
the railway tracks and hurries home through muddy lanes on a rainy day. This is indicated by his
chappals which are sticky with mud. This stanza portrays the monotonousness of the old man, who
sustains the vagaries of weather as well as the estrangement from the man-made.

Stanza 2: The second stanza, the poet represents the alienation of his father that he experiences in his
own dwelling. The poet tells us that his father drinks a weak tea and eats a stale chapatti when he
comes back home. This shows that the even his basic requirements are not properly carried out by his
family. A sense of pity for the poet’s father arises in us, what do you think?

The father is then seen going into a contemplative mood after reading some kind of a philosophical
book. He goes to the toilet and contemplates over man’s alienation from the man-made world. This
exhibits that the man is visibly upset with his predicament. He is terribly shaken when he comes out of
the toilet and trembles while he washes his hands at the wash basin. It seems that he trembled not only
because of the cold water but also due to the thoughts that came into his mind while he was thinking in
the toilet.
The father finds himself all alone in his room as he is written off by his children.

The children do not interact with their father; they do not share their joys or sorrows with him. To
compensate their company, the father listens to the radio. Then he goes to sleep. In his sleep, he dreams
about his ancestors and grandchildren.

Trisha September 12, 2013 ISC Poems, Poem Analysis (by Poet), Poets with initials A to E

Dilip Purushottam Chitre was one of the foremost Indian writers and critics of the post Independence
India. Apart from a being a writer, he was also a painter and a filmmaker. He graduated from the
University of Bombay in 1959. He won the Sahitya Akademi Award (1994) for his Marathi book of
poems Ekun Kavita. Father Returning Home is a short and appealing poem about an old man in a
cosmopolitan city where his own sons and daughters treat him as an alien. He himself is estranged from
the man-made world. Through this poem, Chitre has denounced the urban rootlessness and alienation.

Summary and Analysis of Father Returning Home by Dilip Chitre

Stanza 1: The first stanza of Father Returning Home describes the train journey of his father while
returning home one evening. The father stands among commuters in the yellow light of a local
compartment. The poet describes his father’s reaction against the sights of the suburbs that pass by. His
father remains unmoved by the sights because they are too familiar to him. That is quite normal, isn’t
it? We hardly pay attention to those places where we travel every day, unless the place has something
interesting to offer. Same was with the poet’s father.

The poet then describes his father’s pathetic condition, as he travels during the rainy season. His
clothes become damp and dirty. The black raincoat that he wears becomes stained with mud. His bag
crumbles with the heavy load of the books.Due to old age, the poet’s father’s eyesight has become poor
and therefore he finds difficulty to move about in the dark.
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The poet says that he can see his father getting down the train ‘like a word dropped from a long
sentence.’ The sentence is highly unique and it provides an evocative image of an old man who gets
down from the train as if he is no longer relevant to it. The poet then sees his father hurrying through
the long, grey platform.

The man seems to be as old as the platform, who has been using it as a part of his routine. He crosses
the railway tracks and hurries home through muddy lanes on a rainy day. This is indicated by his
chappals which are sticky with mud. This stanza portrays the monotonousness of the old man, who
sustains the vagaries of weather as well as the estrangement from the man-made.

Stanza 2: The second stanza, the poet represents the alienation of his father that he experiences in his
own dwelling. The poet tells us that his father drinks a weak tea and eats a stale chapatti when he
comes back home. This shows that the even his basic requirements are not properly carried out by his
family. A sense of pity for the poet’s father arises in us, what do you think?

The father is then seen going into a contemplative mood after reading some kind of a philosophical
book. He goes to the toilet and contemplates over man’s alienation from the man-made world. This
exhibits that the man is visibly upset with his predicament. He is terribly shaken when he comes out of
the toilet and trembles while he washes his hands at the wash basin. It seems that he trembled not only
because of the cold water but also due to the thoughts that came into his mind while he was thinking in
the toilet.
The father finds himself all alone in his room as he is written off by his children.

The children do not interact with their father; they do not share their joys or sorrows with him. To
compensate their company, the father listens to the radio. Then he goes to sleep. In his sleep, he dreams
about his ancestors and grandchildren.

It seems that he is trying to communicate with his ancestors who had entered the subcontinent through
the Khyber Pass in the Himalayas in the past. The dream mirrors that the old man is either thinking
about his past (his ancestors) or his future (his grandchildren). It is a kind of relief to him from his
mundane routine, devoid of any human contact.

Have you ever felt so alienated like this old man in Father Returning Home?

Theme: The poem, Father Returning Home focuses on the theme of alienation or estrangement
experienced by the aged in their twilight years. Dilip Chitre talks about his own father and through the
poem, we get to know the alienation, isolation and misery experienced by elderly people, especially in
cities.

Style: Dilip Chitre’s poetry follows the tradition of dramatic monologue. In the poem Father Returning
Home, the poet talks about his father’s loneliness and alienation from the man-made world. He has
brought out the emotions of his father, who is isolated from his family as well as from the outside
world. He has painted the mundane and fatiguing routine of his father in order to highlight the darkness
and misery lurking inside his father’s soul.

Imagery in the poem: The poet uses some fine imagery to describe the lurking loneliness in the man’s
soul as he travels in the local train. To convey the ‘twilight atmosphere’ the poet has used a number of
descriptive words in the poem, like evening train, yellow light, unseeing eyes, his eyes dimmed by age,
fade homeward and gray platform.

An example of imagery is found in the following lines describing the father’s routine of travelling by a
local train,-

“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.”

In the above mentioned lines, the pathos of an old father, returning to his mundane home late in the
evening, is highlighted. A wonderful image is used to describe poet’s father getting down the train. The
poet says that he can see his father getting down the train ‘like a word dropped from a long sentence.’
The sentence is highly unique and it provides an evocative image of an old man who gets down from
the train as if he is no longer relevant to it. This imagery is used to depict the monotonousness and
meaninglessness in the father’s life.

The imagery of dream has been used to show the connection the poet’s father has with his past and his
future. He dreams about his ancestors and his grandchildren. Thus, it signifies his feelings that he has
suppressed in himself and cannot express openly.

Therefore, we can conclude that the poem Father Returning Home is autobiographical in nature. The poem
draws a picture of the poet’s father. He speaks about the loneliness that his father goes through in his everyday
life. Don’t be a silent reader, a thought or two would be appreciated.

The poem speaks about the inner loneliness of the poet’s father, the utter alienation he is experiencing
in the twilight years (man’s 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 man’s soul as he travels in the local train .His bag stuffed with books
is falling apart refers to the state of the old man’s 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.

Dilip Chitre and Father Returning Home

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.
 Father Returning Home: about the poem
 Father Returning Home by Dilip Chitre is probably the most famous poem by this Indian poet.
It is an autobiographical poem where the poet shows the loneliness and world-weariness of an
old man in the modern society by depicting a picture of his own father returning home from
work.
 The poem is a true account of the poet’s father Purushottam Chitre’s life in 1957 when they
moved from Baroda to Mumbai. The poem is expressive of the poet’s feeling for his father at a
later stage. He realized how neglected and uncared-for his father was, even after being the lone
bread-earner for the family.
 But the poem ‘Father Returning Home’ has gone beyond its autobiographical significance. It
is now an account of any old man who does the hard work for his family but leads a
monotonous life where no one is there to take care of him, to converse with him or to
understand his feelings.
 The poem consists of two stanzas of 12 lines each. It is written in free verse with no particular
meter or rhyme scheme followed. And the lack of rhythm is symbolic of the poet’s father’s
uncared-for life. The language is easy and simple but full of symbolic expressions and poetic
devices like simile. It is in first person narrative where the poet-speaker narrates how his
father returns home and what he does thereafter.
 Dilip Chitre: about the poet
 Dilip Purushottam Chitre (1938-2008) was a notable Indian poet, critic, painter and filmmaker
of the modern era. His father used to publish an important periodical Abhiruchi, and perhaps it
had a great influence upon his career. Dilip himself went on to publish one named Shabda along
with Arun Kolatkar and Ramesh Samarth. He was one of the most important figures behind the
“little magazine movement” of the sixties in Marathi. His Ekun Kavita or Collected Poems were
published in the nineteen nineties in three volumes. He also edited An Anthology of Marathi
Poetry (1945–1965). Read more about him at Wikipedia.
 Father Returning Home: Line by line analysis
 My father travels on the late evening train
 The poem begins with the speaker’s description of his father’s travelling home. The father is
travelling in a late evening train after finishing his work for the day. ‘Late evening train’ may
indicate how long the father works so that it regularly gets that late for him to return home.
 Standing among silent commuters in the yellow light
 The father is standing among the silent passengers in the yellow light inside the train
compartment. This line is indicative of his sufferings during the journey. After working so hard,
he is returning home standing on the foot-board, as he doesn’t get a seat there to relax. The
‘silent commuters’ are not friendly enough to converse with him or among themselves. The
yellow light is not the best thing either to promote any cheerfulness. All these things further
intensify his agony and make the journey monotonous.
 Suburbs slide past his unseeing eyes
 The suburbs are sliding past the moving train. But the poet’s father has no intention to look at
those. He is unmoved by these scenes, for he has seen those many a times and finds nothing
new or interesting in it. So the sliding landscapes also add to the sense of monotony.
 His shirt and pants are soggy and his black raincoat
Stained with mud and his bag stuffed with books
Is falling apart.
 Now the poet makes us know that it was a rainy day. His father’s dresses are all wet with the
rain water and the black raincoat is damaged with mud. The bag he was carrying was stuffed
with books and he was struggling to handle it.
 These lines are again indicative of the difficulties poet’s father has to face during his journey. It
gets even worse in the rainy season. The black raincoat might indicate the lack of colour in his
dull life. Again his bag full of books hints that he was an educated and scholarly man, not that
unimportant that one would think from his ordinary routine journey.
 His eyes dimmed by age
fade homeward through the humid monsoon night.
 Now the poet gives us an impression of his father’s age. His eyesight is dimmed by his old age.
The father looks homeward with his low vision through the humid monsoon night. The gloomy
atmosphere also adds to the dullness of his life.
 Now I can see him getting off the train
Like a word dropped from a long sentence.
 The poet’s father gets down from the train. Here Dilip Chitre has used a fine simile in
comparing his father to an unimportant word in a long sentence. This is quite unique. He says
that his father gets down just like a word dropped from a long sentence. The poet indicates how
unimportant his father is to the crowd in the train. It does not really make any difference
whether he got down or not. He is not that relevant to the rest of the world.
 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.
 After getting off the train the father hurries towards his home. He crosses the grey platform and
the railway line and finally enters the lane. His ‘sticky with mud’ chappals can’t prevent him
hurrying onward.
 The poet has used the word ‘hurries’ twice to bring in a sense of escapism from the dull humid
atmosphere, grey platform and muddy streets where no one would care for him. He just wants
some solace at his own home.
 Home again, I see him drinking weak tea,
Eating a stale chapati, reading a book.
 The second stanza of the poem Father Returning Home begins here. In this stanza the poet
depicts the isolation of his father in his own home.
 The poet sees his father reach home again like the other days. Then he sees him drink weak tea
and eat a stale chapati. The poet hints at how nobody cares for him even at home. But the man
does not have any complain with his tea or food, as he is used to it. As we see, he rather
concentrates on reading a book while having his tea. He has probably given up on expecting
more care form his family members.
 He goes into the toilet to contemplate
Man’s estrangement from a man-made world.
 Now the speaker’s father goes into the toilet with a thought of how men become isolated from
the man-made world. And this line nearly sums up the theme of the entire poem. The father
is indeed aware of his estranged situation and hopes to find some support in the family when he
hurries towards his home. But the hope is diminished as he reaches and finds the same
indifference there. Moreover, the toilet might act as a symbol of how small his world has been.
The toilet seems to be the only place the man has to go to contemplate over his loneliness.
 Coming out he trembles at the sink,
The cold water running over his brown hands,
 The father comes out from the toilet and goes to wash his hands at the wash basin. The speaker
observed him trembling at the sink when cold water was running down his brown hands. His
trembling might be due to his old age, the coldness of the water and also the fearful thought of
his isolation from the rest of the world.
 A few droplets cling to the greying hairs on his wrists.
 A few drops of water clinging to the grey hairs on his wrists may have some greater
implication. Water generally symbolizes life and grey hairs stand for the old age. So, the old
man’s life is just holding on to his old age. This life has no significance to anyone else.
 His sullen children have often refused to share
Jokes and secrets with him.
  Now the poet goes on to talk about the old man’s relationship to his family members. His bad-
tempered children refuse to share jokes and secrets with him. That said, they don’t share a close
and friendly association with their father. Rather they regard him as an outdated, unwanted
burden, though he seems to be the only earning member of the family.
 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.
 We are in the final stage of the poem where we see the father going to sleep listening to the
radio and thinking of many things like his ancestors, his grandchildren and of the Aryans, the
people entering the Indian subcontinent through the Khyber Pass in the ancient time.
 The sound of the radio is even noisy (static), giving another reference to the old man’s
miserable life. However, his dreaming of his ancestors and grandchildren gives the impression
that he finds some solace in thinking about his past and future generation. It is an attempt to
escape from his mundane routine-life devoid of human contact. Again, his thought of the
Aryans may indicate that he is thinking of how the society has changed since the ancient times
when they had come here. Now this modern world has no place for the elderly people, has no
one to think about their loneliness or care for them.
 Thus, the poem ‘Father Returning Home’ by Dilip Chitre sympathises with the old neglected
people in our society. No doubt, his message is well delivered here. This poem has given the
poet a lot of respect and popularity through all these years.

 Overview
 I interpreted this completely differently to the majority of analysis I read before creating this post,
but I will give you both interpretations.
 Others have said that this poem is about the increasing alienation of the older generation and a
father who feels increasingly lonely in his world and with his family who no longer relate to him.
 I actually see this as a poem about a dedicated father who has worked his skin to the bone in order
to drag his family up from the gutters. Having somewhat succeeded his children have grown up
to be different to him and their more affluent background means that feel they cannot relate to
him. Nevertheless I see a sense of pride in where the father has helped him family go and
recognising his role in the rise and success of his bloodline.

Background

Dilip Chitre is one of best known poets, independent India has produced. He wrote in both English and
Marathi which was his mother tongue. Apart from writing poetry, he dabbled in painting and film
making too. Most of his writing is centered on Mumbai where a lack of security or a sense of belonging
and alienation were problems encountered by people who came to the city in search of livelihood.

Metaphorical Inference

The theme of this poem is modern man’s estrangement with the manmade world. Ironically, the
manmade world teams with people but man grows more and more remote from those around him. This
estrangement is reflected even in his relations with his family. When the old man comes home after a
tiring day at work, there is no one to care for him or engage him in conversation. The tragedy of the old
man is not unique but one that is seen commonly in cosmopolitan cities.

Summary

The shabby old man is the archetype of the individual who faces alienation in society. This is a
common theme in literature all the world over. When we first see the old man, he is travelling home in
the crowded train sandwiched by other silent commuters. Dressed in soiled clothes marked by the dirt
and squalor of the teeming city in the intense conditions of the monsoon, the old man watches the city
flying past. The description of the old man emphasizes his weariness and isolation. He is well beyond
the age to work but he plods on as he needs to earn money. His departure from the train is also
unremarkable, “like a word dropped from a long sentence”. No one notices his entry into the house as
he is left to drink his tepid tea and eat his chapatti in silence. Even his thoughts on man’s estrangement
in the modern world have to be in the privacy of his toilet without an audience. He has a family but
they do not bother to bring any mirth or joy into his life. It is only when he sleeps that he has animated
dreams; he dreams of his country being run over by the conquering hordes of nomads.