“Life signs” is the title poem of the volume Life Signs. The father-son relationship has been explored quite extensively and intensively in Indian English poetry, by Ramanujan, Parthasarathy, Shiv. K. Kumar and others and “Father” poems have become even a sub-genre of Indian Poetry in English.
“Life Signs” captures the central preoccupation of Mahapatra’s poetry, the irrevocable influence of the Father (by extension, the hoary tradition of the land) and the anxiety of the son-persona (the modernist, rationalist, unbeliever poet, by extension) to be freed of it Structurally, the poem is “a loosely connected set of evocative signs rather than a system and discourse” and such a poem with shifting metaphors may challenge neat interpretation; yet it “can have a great power to convey a highly complex experience and can acquire haunting beauty” (G.N. Devy).
“The Cows” can be read as a companion poem.
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11.1- 2: What’s in my…: a blunt statement of the son-persona’s in ability to “occupy” the beliefs of the father
11. 3-5: a sense of loss caused by separation between father and son described in terms of the flowing river; the image of flow may also imply the passage of a major category in Mahapatra’s vision.
11.6- 10: an associative cluster of signs: “sun”, “kites” and “clouds” evoking the sense of agedness of the traditions, which haunts him.
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1. 15: “the odour”…: another image evoking the sense of decay
11. 19-20: “come to rest”: typical Mahapatran obscurities which are the interpreter’s despair:
11.23- 24: a conflict between the traditional beliefs and the rationalist skepticism of those beliefs-
11.23- 24: the sense of loss and a discovery of a strange wisdom.