Father Returning Home

“Father Returning Home” is a poem in conflict with itself. The poem says one thing but, in fact, ends up doing something quite different.

The key to understanding the design of the poem is to be aware of the narrative frame. The poem subtly insinuates the frame. The poem, for instance, would be different if it began with three simple words: “I can imagine.” Rather, the poem begins with an immediacy that allows the speaker to become part of his father’s world. The central character is not the sad and lonely father struggling to provide for a family that has drifted emotionally from him. The central character is one of the father’s grown children, one of those “sullen” (Line 20) kids lurking behind their bedroom doors while the father prepares his late dinner The child is now grown and evidently struggling with guilt over never acknowledging his father when they were growing up.

Years later, through the vehicle of the poem, that grown child finally bonds emotionally, and imaginatively with his lonely father. In the imaginative projection that the poem records, the grown child achieves the kind of compassion and empathy he lacked as a child there behind his bedroom door. That empathy becomes the joy that animates Chitre’s melancholy poem. Using his imagination, the poet projects, inhabits, and shares each scene with the father he ignored long ago.

The poem opens with a detailed picture of the father crowded with the other “silent” (Line 2) commuters at the city train station late one rainy night. Then the image changes to the commuter ride itself. The imagery focuses on the father sitting silently, hunched against the window, his eyes glazed over. He is tired, dispirited by a long day of tedious work. He feels defeated, trapped within a life he cannot control, a loneliness he cannot remedy.

The detailing creates a feeling of the father’s irrelevancy and how the urban world disregards his humanity. There is no dignity to the father, no sense of integrity or pride. His clothes are soggy from the rain, his shoes and pants spattered with mud from running from his office to the train station, and his cheap bookbag is “falling apart” (Line 6).

It is easy, really tempting to fall into the trap of pitying the father and how completely the rat-race world of his city work has crushed his spirit. He is just one of thousands, really millions, of the demoralized, the alienated, the quietly desperate.

However, pity, Chitre understands, is different from sympathy and nowhere near the energy and generous reach of empathy. Imagine the commuter ride is a painting, not difficult given Chitre’s extensive background in the visual arts. Yes, the image of the listless zombie-commuter creates sadness until the observer considers the frame, the literal frame of the painting. This image is a painting, an imaginative projection by an artist transcending their reality by wanting to capture the feeling, the loneliness, the boredom, and the sadness of the subject of the painting.

That conflict continues as the speaker recreates the father’s arrival back home. He hurries home not because he anticipates some kind of happy reunion with his loving family but more because of the relentless monsoon rains. The speaker records the sad and lonely dinner—stale plain flatbread and weak tea. The father eats alone, even though his children are right there in their bedrooms. His solitude is broken only by a book he reads. Then the poet creates the image of the father as he does his late-night ablutions in the bathroom. The grown son imagines the father thinking grand thoughts about humanity’s existential alienation, informed as much by his considerable education and his ambitious reading as by his own soul-crushing life. That he has these grand thoughts as he urinates undercuts the grandness of the philosophy almost to the point of snarky mockery.

Mockery, however, is not the goal of the poem. The speaker, now grown, defies his father’s isolation through the vehicle of his imagination. In his imagination, he is there with his father as he eats alone at the table. The poet defies the isolation and privacy of the father’s toilet. The son even shares his father’s thoughts. He reveals how much, years later, he now understands about the father he so sullenly ignored back then. I am there now with you, he says to his father across the years. I know now what it must have been like.

To underscore the speaker’s empathy the speaker offers the image of the father going to bed. The father switches on the radio on the bedside table as he falls asleep. Too tired to care, he leaves the radio on static, forsaking the usual comforts of music, sports, or news. The static underscores the isolation and loneliness of the father and his exhaustion as he falls asleep alone knowing that in a few hours, he must get up and do this day all over again. However, the father is not alone—there is the presence of the grown son who years later tenderly and compassionately creates this image of his father.

The ultimate expression of the speaker’s belated empathy, the ultimate defiance of his father’s loneliness, comes in the closing five lines when the speaker actually shares in the private space of the poignant dreamworld of his father. He shares in the father’s dreams of the family’s heroic ancestors, “nomads” (Line 24), coming from Asia to India, courageously braving the challenging narrow mountain passes, most likely the Khyber Pass. The speaker also shares his father’s joyous dreams of future grandchildren. Perhaps, given the period suggested by Chitre’s own biography, the speaker, years later, has children now and wishes his father was alive to share in that family joy.

The closing lines then become an expression of compassion and empathy, the grown son’s way of righting the wrong of his teenage years when he would stay in his bedroom and ignore his father. Years too late, the father receives the kindness and understanding of the son for which he sacrificed so much to provide. That empathy for the father, in turn, gives a belated radiance to the father’s day-to-day life of unending desperation.