Point of Return [Paperback]

Siddhartha Deb (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 19, 2002

A moving story of a young man's relationship with his father and with India's past This is the story of a father and son, Dr Dam and Babu. The father crossed to India from Bangladesh at Partition. He knew nothing of the world he and his family had been catapulted into, but he made his way as best he could, always sticking to his principles and being guided by his morals. For this he earned himself a reputation as a strange and rather unlucky man, but he also gained the respect of many colleagues and acquaintances. As his father weakens and wearies of life, Babu, his son, begins to learn and understand a little better all that his father has gone through. He begins to retrace Dr Dam's long journey from childhood right up to his experiences in the present, including his endless fight with the bureaucratic corruption and indifference that surrounded him in his work. In this way Babu starts to pull together both his own family's life and the turbulence of the years that followed Partition. Deb writes in the most moving and delicate way about the hidden stories of India. He has an eye for the most delicious and insightful details of everday life, and the warmth and talent to tell a story both from the personal and from the historical perspective with great success.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

An "inept archeologist of memories" is how Babu, the narrator of Deb's elegiac debut novel, describes himself in this perceptive, if convoluted, tale about a generation gap between father and son in 1970s and '80s India. Babu's narrative unfolds in reverse chronological order as he tries to do justice to his father's life. Dr. Dam, a Hindu veterinary surgeon, has to flee his native Bengal when India is partitioned in 1947. He moves to a northern hill town in the state of Assam and becomes a civil servant, one of the few who is conspicuously upstanding in a corrupt postpartition bureaucracy where bribery and thievery reign. By the time Babu is born in 1970, Dr. Dam, now aged 44, has changed. He still has his old-fashioned rectitude (which Babu finds embarrassing) and Nehru-inspired ideals of national unity (which seem increasingly irrelevant as sectarian violence blooms), but he refuses to challenge the ineptitude around him. To Babu, Dr. Dam's servility in dealing with high-ranking, unrefined superiors smacks of a colonial mentality, remnants of his youth under the Raj. Babu learns much later about a long-ago pivotal incident in which his father felt duty-bound to reveal graft and paid a terrible price. Deb draws a sharp, memorable picture of the misunderstandings between father and son, exacerbated by rapid changes in India's political and cultural landscape. The structure of the narrative sometimes makes it hard to understand the chronology of events, but Deb convincingly shows how Babu comes to admire and mourn his father, and movingly dramatizes the immersion of individual lives in the flow of history.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Growing up in postcolonial India can seem a nostalgic, romantic thing of the movies. But Deb, in this debut novel, presents a more realistic look at what it was like to come of age in a provincial town during the nationalistic fervor in the time of Indira Gandhi's rule. Babu, the inquisitive son of a Bengali civil servant, grows up in a remote northeastern Indian state. His father, Dr. Dam, the director of the veterinary and dairy department of the state, was a principled, devoted government official who grew up in the time of India's partition and fled with his family from East Pakistan, which became Bangladesh. He silently battled the political corruption all around him as well as the anti-Bengali fervor that enveloped the town in its spirit of tribalism and nationalistic renewal. Babu's relationship with his father is filled with straining and awkward silences. But together, in this story told in reverse chronological order, they forge an understanding of each other and a mutual respect, and Babu longs to know his father further, even long after Dr. Dam's eventual decline and death. In this magnificent coming-of-age novel, Deb chronicles an end to India's age of innocence as it struggles to define itself as a distinct entity in the modern global world. Michael Spinella
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Picador (July 19, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0330493566
• ISBN-13: 978-0330493567
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Memory is about what you decide to remember.", May 22, 2003

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
(COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Point of Return: a novel (Hardcover)

In this sensitively imagined and astutely observed novel, Babu, son of veterinarian Dr. Dam, reminisces about his father's life, trying to understand him--at least to the extent that sons can ever understand their fathers. Acutely aware that every generation views events and experiences through knowledge gained during own lifetimes, Babu recognizes that though he and his father have shared many events, their views of these events are vastly different, in each case conditioned by their separate, though sometimes intersecting, pasts.

The Dam family is Bengali, managing to escape the 1979 civil war there by fleeing to Assam, a remote, northeastern province of India nestled between Bangladesh and Bhutan. Supporting his elderly parents and several brothers and sisters, and marrying and starting a family late in life, Dr. Dam has spent his career as an honest civil servant within a corrupt Indian government. Babu, born in India, has never known the places which shaped the lives of his father and grandparents and which still live in their hearts. Separated by both temperament and by dissimilar backgrounds, Dr. Dam and Babu are remote from each other until they are brought together dramatically through Dr. Dam's debilitating stroke.

Deb's straightforward and often elegant prose is particularly effective for its subtlety. Lacking the lush description so frequently found in novels with Indian settings, the novel concentrates instead on universal values and the father-son search for understanding. The novel is less exotic, despite its unusual setting, than some other Indian novels, but more accessible to readers from other cultures and more potent in its observations about life. In an ironic twist, the author uses his clear, unadorned prose to provide Dr. Dam's personal history in a chronology which, though linear, moves backward in time, as Babu, aged seventeen, recalls what he knows of his father and the events and people which have influenced him.

The reverse chronology is much like the history we all create for our parents whenever we try to mine our own experiences for insights into their lives in an effort to find common ground and understand who we think they are. We recall past events in their lives which we think are important based on our own experiences, not theirs. With its focus both on a man coming to terms with his father's life, and on everyone's yearning for a homeland, even after it is gone, Deb provides observations which expand our own view of what forms our characters, and gives us new insights into universal truths. Mary Whipple

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Moving, June 3, 2003

By 

I. M. Idle - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Point of Return: a novel (Hardcover)

With its fractured timeline and foreign (even for Indians) Indian states, this book will swirl around you. Yield to it. Enjoy it. Be disturbed by it. Draw parallels with your own life (especially if you no longer live where you did as a child). And more often than not, be transported.

This book moves you through geography, through time, through life. And it is a journey that you will be glad that you took.

While I eagerly await Mr. Deb's next book, I am troubled by the idea that he might never write another book that is so true, and so felt. Regardless, don't let this one pass you by.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Consult a map & read it twice!, June 10, 2003

By 

fdr - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Point of Return: a novel (Hardcover)

This is no light or easy read; the chronology and narrative perspective of this book change, and the shifts are sometimes unsettling. This I took to be part of the author's design, and by the end of the book I found it effective, a part of the chaos of memory that speaks true. I also found myself wishing the overleaf of the book had a map of the regions, as place is so important in the novel and I was unfamiliar with more than basic Indian geography. I would recommend that a reader unfamiliar with these regions print out a map (and also note what the country looked like in the days before Partition) before beginning on this literary journey. It's a journey I'm glad to have made, and although I have not yet undertaken a second read, that was my first impulse when I came to the end -- I felt there was so much more for me to mine from the intertwined stories of Babu's and Dr. Dam's lives as shared by Deb than I had been able to absorb in one pass. A good writer writes what he knows and speaks the truth -- much easier said than done -- and Deb has done both quite beautifully in this book.