4 ideas
The narration splits him into his present self and the Younis he left behind, and has them address each other. Former comrades, lovers and family show him that the country kept moving without him, and that the self he imagined as frozen and waiting was his own invention.
Telling a life in the second person ('you') puts the narrator in the position of both accuser and accused. The older self questions the younger self as if interrogating a stranger. This makes visible that remembering your past is an act of judging someone who no longer exists and cannot answer on equal terms.
Exile cuts a life in two and leaves an unlived alternative: the person you would have become had you stayed. That counterfactual self keeps living in the exile's imagination as a rival, a reproach and a measure of what was gained or betrayed. Returning home means facing that double, and the exile finds that neither version can claim moral superiority.
The exile keeps an image of home fixed at the moment of departure, including its streets, its politics and the people who knew him. On return, that image fails on every point, because those who stayed were changed, co-opted or broken by the regime in ways the exile never saw. The returnee's sense of loss is therefore partly grief for a place that existed only in his memory.