Father’s Day Special: Dilip Chitre’s Poem, Father Returning Home
This week in Daak:
1. Father’s Day Special: Dilip Chitre’s Poem, Father Returning Home
2. Gift Envelopes for All Occasions
3. Daak Recommends
1. Father’s Day Special: Dilip Chitre’s Poem, Father Returning Home
One of the more welcome changes of modern life is the increasing involvement and presence of fathers in their children’s lives. The studied distance and stoicism of a socially enforced masculinity has estranged many fathers from their families in prior generations. In being a strong ‘father figure’, many men have missed out on the tenderness and intimacy of the parent-child relationship, learning little of their children’s hopes, dreams, joys and fears.
Dilip Chitre’s quietly heartbreaking poem, “Father Returning Home,” captures this alienation in the portrait of a man worn down by his life. He braves the city and elements to return home, only to find a wide emotional chasm between him and his family. He remains an outsider, contemplating his own isolation and finding no recourse against it.
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.
2. Gift Envelopes for All Occasions
Check out our latest collection of gift envelopes and brighten up your festive giving!
3. Daak Recommends
Read another Daak on the evocative poetry of Dilip Chitre, and check out this archival interview to learn more about Chitre’s life, personality and craft.