The House of My Childhood: Dilip Chitre

By: Bijay Kant Dubey 

The house of my childhood stood empty
On a grey hill
All its furniture gone
Except my grandmother's grindstone
And the brass figurines of her gods

After the death of all birds
Bird-cries still fill the mind
After the city's erasure
A blur still peoples the air
In the colourless crack that comes before morning
In a place where nobody can sing
Words distribute their silence
Among intricately clustered glyphs

My grandmother's voice shivers on a bare branch
I toddle around the empty house
Spring and summer are both gone
Leaving an elderly infant
To explore the rooms of age

The house where he was born, where he grew up, where he spent his boyhood sharing his childhood memories, he remembers it in the poem going back to the days, slipping through the balconies of thought, idea and reflection, walking down the memory lanes, revisiting them as for a poetical reminiscence and sketch. How was his house one day? What did it turn into? A house when man lives in and when not, how the picture? How was the house when the grandmother was and how did it turn into when she was not? How was the old town? How is it today? Only her brass figurines of gods sustaining her faith are there. The grindstone is. But where her furniture?

How the bird cries used to rend the sky? How did they desert it? Now the birds are not. Only the music of memories, the music of their chirrup fills the vacnt mind. The cities have changed so have their landscape and scenery so have ideas and values.There is nothing as that of the relics of the old town and old people and old values, what it is good to be taken out and the bad to be left. But who hears it now-a-days? Who thinks about society and  environment, man and his relationship with the trees? The towns and cities bereft of Nature appear to be the dwellings of the hollow men.

Nobody lives in the house. The house lies it empty unattended and uncared for. The  ancestors have left for so have the descendents in search of greener pastures and better avenues. Who will remain concerned with pastoral, agrarian farmhouses and small opportunities? The old paternal, ancestral house lies it there abandoned just bearing their memories existent so far as long as as its span is.

The poet as a child fancies his days into it on finding none around him and the house lying closed nor can he feel spring and summer as both of them seem to be gone as is the case with the city people living in flats. Given the situation under, what can he do rather than exploring the rooms of age in the company of an elderly infant?

But we are not sure of who the elderly infant care-taker or watchman is here mentioned in this poem is. How the modern craze is without which one cannot? How the compulsions, fissures and frictions of time? How the bond of our relationships? How the times keep shifting? How do the images of life and the world? How do our systems and values? The house of time dilapidates it one day, but the memories connected remain with for sometime more.

A house remains a house as long as the people live in and since when they start leaving it, the same starts turning into a deserted mansion from the same moment. Tme develops cracks and fissures.To buld the house is not enough. There must be some to take care of. But our bondings and relationships keep canging under the pressure of time. Situations too compel one to take to different paths. But experience teaches it otherwise. There is something of Nissim Ezekiel’s  Enterprise and Thomas Hood’s My Childhood. One can also mark the traces of Charles Lamb’s Dream Children: A Reverie. The elderly fellow taking care of the house is but an infant of Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man.