Father Returning home

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 onwards.

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 hair 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.