The Point of Return!? I'm still wondering why..

I finished reading the rest of the book, "The Point of Return", by Siddhartha Deb. Finally. I think I originally started on it more than a month ago, early August I think. I didn't have but 50-60 pages left as of the last post, but it took me longer than I thought it would, esp. since I was at work, and I kept getting interrupted every now and then. Then again there were some very interesting passages in there, that I read and re-read and wrote down in my journal/planner.

The following excerpts in particular jumped out at me. This first one especially, I could've been writing about myself.

"As for me.. there were mostly failures. Failures in love and work, moving from town to city.. restless and uncertain..
I make no bones about my failure. Things could have turned out differently, but they didn't. If I foreclosed my engineering career, choosing what I saw as freedom over following an unexciting if well-honed groove, the illusion of that freedom disappeared soon enough in the face of everyday routine.. An unappealing job.. in the evening, an empty apartment to go back to.. the weight of books on dusty shelves, memories in some distant corner, the strangeness of one's own face when seen in a cheap mirror over a small sink, the sudden awareness of my.. breath as I bend over the lock at the front door."

"How did I achieve this unlikely feat of forgetting in the very act of remembrance.. ..the answer must be that I chose to forget. Memory is also about what you decide to remember, so that you can make sense of what has been irrevocably lost. That was the only way the past could be recovered.."

"I don't know if those friends of mine remain in touch with each other and if I am the only one who has broken the circuit. Although I have little news of them, one feels that they too are dissolved in the vast spaces that opened up once we left the town. The sporadic correspondence we maintained for a while ultimately ceased, each step one took in the adult world - career, marriage, children - serving to increase the distance from the past.... Small-town boys settled in the United States or Australia or New Zealand, where they will become old men and sit on their front porches or lawns at the end of their lives, trying to remember whether the decades have taken them across many continents or if they are still in the first, original place where their old friends live around the corner."

Having finished reading it, I have a better appreciation for the book today than even just a couple of days ago. I like it, it's a little different, and the reverse chronological order of the story can get a little aggravating at times, but in the end, Siddhartha Deb ties the knots together. And it opened my eyes to the unique problems of the Indian North-East. While it is no "The Kite Runner", it is a must read none-the-less.