Dilip Chitre is a noted and influential bilingual poet and translator who works in Marathi and English. He has a sizeable literary output in both languages. His versatile creative practice extends to painting and film-making – activities that he sees as seamless “extensions” of his “poetic sensibility”. “Poetry”, he writes, “has been the mainstay of my creative practice for more than fifty years and it could be my way of wrapping up my life.”
Father Returning Home” -by Dilip Chitre
*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.
Reflect my grief
River of loss and gain
Mother of bliss
Source of pain
Make my face
Reflect the sky
And every cloud
Passing by
River receive
My ashes and
Hold my spirit
In your watery hand
LOST IMAGES
For Ashay
I am backing home where you died.
One year later, to find
Changes that mask our surrender
To the inevitability of life.
I remember my Ambulance Ride
With my friend whom you called Daddy.
It took me a whole year
To understand my loss.
A lifetime is not enough
To realize what it means to be human:
We waste what we are given
To crave for what we cannot have.
This much I know by now
As a maker of images:
A face erased in front
Of the mirror that is our Lord.
Vithoba was seen by Tukaram
Reflected in the deep end,
Where the river was its own source
And the ocean that waits for it.
Perhaps when you struggled for breath
As you finally choked to death,
You tried to forgive your parent
And the world he created with you.
And so, finally, you grew
Up to surpass your father—
Becoming a reflected sky
In the water we call life.
The first picture I took of you
In the Princess Tsehai Hospital—
In Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
In the last week of June, 1961:
Sister Aiyyalij held you in her arms;
And her hand was on your covered breast.
It showed the finger on her ring
As large as your closed eyes.
Your struggle for a breath
Began before you were born,
And on December 4, 1984
In Bhopal it all came back.
You struggled for breath all your life,
Fighting for life, and looking for its sign—
An autograph of awareness,
The reassurance of your own being.
You don’t know that you’ve left behind
Images that tell, images that haunt,
Images in which others will find
The reflection that fills God’s mirror.
Where the Lord Himself twists and turns
In agony that’s the other side of bliss.
His reverse is us, his children,
A family that He craves to own.
And, in the end, there’s no loss,
And there’s no gain either
We neither live nor die
In the endless space of why.
Pune
29 November 2004
0:35 a.m.