Jin Mah, an old man who owns a shabby Chinese restaurant, refuses to sell his property to the almighty masters of development. Until one day, his restaurant was burned into ashes. Trapped in the tyranny of his past, he meets two young souls who will remind him that protecting one’s own empire of memory is a far greater task. A philosophical query on longing and impermanence, “Variations on Forgetting,” the short debut novel of Philippine Daily Inquirer reporter Mariejo S. Ramos, sieves the many forms of forgetting we experience within the labyrinths of urban life, the fleetingness of love and the cruelty of fragmented memory.