Product Description

Set in the remote, northeastern hills of India, The point of return revolves around the father-son relationship of a willful, curious boy, Babu, and Doctor Dam, an enigmatic product of British colonial rule and Nehruvian nationalism. Told in reverse chronological order, the novel examines an India where the ideals that brought freedom from colonial rule are beginning to crack under the pressure of new rebellions and conflicts. For Dr. Dam and Babu, this has meant living as strangers in the same home, puzzled and resentful, tied only by blood. As the father grows weary and old and the son tries to understand him, clashes between ethnic groups in their small town show them to be strangers to their country as well. Before long, Babu finds himself embarking on a great journey, an odyssey through the memories of his father, his family, and his nation.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #645942 in Books
• Published on: 2004-02-19
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .1 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

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.

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
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Review
“Deb’s touch is sure, his voice pure, his understanding faultless.” (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel )

“Magnificent.” (Booklist (starred review ) )

“The interplay of political events and intergenerational conflict is wonderfully portrayed.” (San Diego Union-Tribune )

“Movingly dramatizes the immersion of individual lives in the flow of history.” (Publishers Weekly )

“Siddhartha Deb has imagined a kind of Indian Don Quixote.” (New York Times Book Review )