Father Returning Home

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1987

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

The Existential Loneliness of Contemporary Life

Near the end of the poem, the speaker suggests that the father is a person of some learning: “He goes to the toilet to contemplate / Man’s estrangement from a man-made world” (Lines 15-16). He also carries a satchel “stuffed with books” (Line 5) to work and then back home. While he eats dinner alone, he pages through a book. When he attends to his bathroom before bed, he thinks deep thoughts, suggesting he reads philosophical books that test the horizons of existence. These books suggest to him that purpose in life is not the same thing as meaning.

The father is alone despite an office job in a teeming city, despite the long commuter ride in a train crammed with people, and despite sharing his home with his family. The city offers no comfort; neither does home. His children ignore him and find him irrelevant. When “[h]is sullen children often have refused to share / Jokes and secrets with him” (Lines 20-21), he seeks solace in the privacy of his reading. In short, the poem offers the father as a template for the existential anxiety that individuals in this modern world do not belong anywhere.

Surrounded by people, the father feels isolated and alienated, a part of but apart from his world. The poem offers no explanation: The father simply cannot connect with others. He does nothing to deserve such loneliness. He is not mean-spirited. He does not mock his fellow commuters. He does not emotionally abuse his children. He is a good man, a gentle man, a thoughtful man, and a lonely man. He bonds with others—his ancestors and his descendants—only in his dreams. Loneliness then is the very condition of contemporary existence.

The Dynamic Between a Father and His Children

There is an intimacy, a sense of personal confession to this poem. Chitre himself expounded in copious interviews surrounding the publication of Traveling in a Cage (1980) about the difficult memories that occasioned “Father Returning Home.” Growing up in Vadodara, Chitre recalled going with his father to his small print shop and helping his father mix paints and inks, learning apprentice work with the shop’s different presses. It was a time that not only introduced Chitre to how to balance colors and the intriguing geometry of shapes, both critical to his later development as an expressionist painter, but those shared days also gave the boy invaluable personal time with his father. That closeness was all but lost when the family relocated to Mumbai and the father began to work long hours in the city and commute home late at night.

The poem captures this sense of estrangement and emotional distance. There is no tipping-point memory, no dramatic moment when the children broke off with their father, and no toxic conflict that drove the children from their father. The poem recreates a typical evening long after the children realized they are no longer close to their father. The father arrives too late to share the evening meal. The children no longer share their day with their father. The father eats alone. He tidies up alone. He goes to bed alone—set to repeat the same day tomorrow. There is no trauma, no anger, no showdown. The father loves his children. His children, in their own way, love their father. The father, however, has to make a living, and that commitment to provide costs him the emotional closeness to the family that means so much to him.

The Consolation of the Imagination

“Father Returning Home” is neither a narrative nor a memory. The poem instead is a recreation, an imaginative projection by the grown son. After all, the scenes depicted so vividly in the poem—the father at the suburban train station, his soggy clothes, his tattered satchel stuffed with books, his ride on the train, his hurrying through the middy streets, and ultimately his bedtime rituals—are not the actual memories of the speaker. He witnessed none of them. The speaker is not looking back. Rather he is generously and compassionately giving shape to the father he now understands he never quite understood. Thus, the poem is in its way a gift of love.

The speaker carefully recreates his father, depicting intimate details as he animates his father through the energy of his imagination. Within the expansive grasp of his imagination, the speaker “sees” his father—his listless eyes on the suburban commuter train, his late dinner of weak tea and stale flatbread, his boots sticky with mud, the graying hairs on his wrist. The grown son even imagines himself into the intimacy of his father’s dreams. In this sympathetic gesture, the speaker bonds with his father in a way he did not in those nights when the father would come home exhausted and defeated, eat alone, and head off to bed. After all, back then, the speaker was one of the father’s “sullen children” (Line 20) who indifferently ignored the emotional complexity of a loving father dying slowly one long and grueling day at a time. In this, the poem explores the rich consolation of the imagination.