A Matter of Postmodern

Except from book, …He heard his father cry out -they had left the camera with his mother."All this way, and no picture," he’d said, shaking his head. He reached into his pocket and began to throw the striped stone into the water. "We will have to remember it, then." They looked around, at the gray and white town that glowed across the harbor. Then they started back again, for a while trying not to make an extra set of footsteps, inserting their shoes into theones they had just made. A wind had picked up, so strong that it forced them to stop now and them.

  "Will you remember this day, Gogol?" his father had asked, turning back to look at him, his hands pressed like earmuffs to either side of his head.

  "How long do I have to remember it?" Over the rise and fall of the wind, he could hear his father’s laughter. He was standing there, waiting for Gogol to catch up, putting out a hand as Gogol drew near.

  "Try to remember it always," he said once Gogol had reached him, leading him slowly back across the backwater, to where his mother and Sonia stood waiting. "Remember that you and I made this journey, that we went together to a place where there was nowhere left to go."

This is my favorite part of the book where Gogol was his train back home and came across particular mise en scene that remind him of his late father. After his father sudden departs, he went on his own journey of rediscovery of the past memory of his dad. And little by little, he started to comprehend how it is like to lose someone that give him life as his father went through when he was young. There’s one part where his grandparent pass away, following Bengali tradition, siblings of the dead has to shave off their hair. When one day his dad came out from the washroom, he find it amusing to look at his father hairless for the first time. For that following month, his dad has to wear cap to work.