18 pages • 36 minutes read
Dilip ChitreFather Returning Home
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1987A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Commuter Train
The commuter train symbolizes the disconnection and alienation of the modern, urban, working world. Ironically, the commuter train could easily symbolize a respite from the impersonal and soul-numbing oppression of the working world. After all, it is public transportation. As such, the commuter train brings together the victims of the rat race culture. The train could provide commuters, who take the same train at the same hour each day, the chance to meet and greet familiar faces, conduct impromptu and convivial conversations, share stories about families, and even commiserate about their work.
Here, however, the city’s commuter train symbolizes the quiet desperation of the commuters themselves. The father waits at the station, bathed in the sickly yellow of the station’s security lighting. The commuters themselves wait in insulating silence. There is no effort made to break through the silence with even the casual blather of chit chat as they wait for the train. They are tired, their energy and passion sapped.
On the train itself, the father sits alone, never looking out at the world, never looking about at the other commuters. He sits uncomfortably, his shoes and pants soggy from the monsoon rain. He is in his own world, anesthetized against the real world, where the “suburbs slide past his unseeing eyes” (Line 3). These commuters are the urban zombies, the city’s living dead. The commuter train symbolizes the crushing impact of the workday.
Stale Flatbread and Weak Tea
The late dinner meal that the father prepares when he gets home symbolizes the failure of communication and the lack of community within his family. Playing on the traditional image of Christian communion, a congregational coming-together around the sacred wine and the bread of the host, the father’s dinner parodies communion.
The father’s evening meal is a study in isolation. The father eats alone. He arrives home too late to eat with his children as he did once. He recalls how he and his kids would once share stories and joke at the dinner table. Even though the children are right there in the house, they stay apart from their father in their rooms. His work has taken him from them.
Each element of his dinner symbolizes various aspects of his dreary and dead-end life. The chapati bread is stale and flat, suggesting the father’s own passionless life sapped of possibilities. Like bare flatbread served without savory enhancements, his life now provides only the barest of sustenance, flavorless and tasteless. The weak tea itself suggests how the world has emasculated the father. The watered-down drink suggests a routine life without even the expectation or possibility of a caffeine-like jolt of unexpected joy, happiness, excitement, or adventure.
Radio Static
When the father retires to his bedroom, he turns on his radio to comfort his loneliness. However, he falls off to sleep not to music or news or sports broadcasts. Rather, he falls asleep to the white noise of static, the jumbled crackling nothingness that plays between strong radio station signals. The static, in turn, suggests exactly how tired the man is from a long day. He cannot muster even the minimum energy to adjust the radio dial.
The radio static symbolizes the father’s life itself, lost between signals. He is unable to find reward in his work in the city. He returns home to the family for whom he sacrifices so much and finds no reward there. Suspended in between, the father’s entire life is like the static. Like static, the father’s life offers no message, no content, no valuable information, not even the soothing sounds of music. Just the steady, bleak unremitting snow-crackle of meaningless white noise.
However, the static soothes the father. In fact, that meaninglessness ushers the father out of his dreary now and into the sweet refuge he finds in sleep. His dreams reanimate his ancestors and their courageous journey across the mountains. His dreams give him the chance to enjoy the playful company of his yet-unborn grandchildren. In his dreams, he discovers adventure, hope, excitement, and joy. When the father is awake, however, his life is like the static between stations on the radio.
