Description

For fifteen years, a woman came to the house every morning. He knew how much sugar she took in her tea. He knew when she went home to her village for Manasa Puja.

He never knew her name.

Patrealisation is ten stories about the arrangements nobody argues with.

A schoolboy splits a chocolate egg, hands the girl her half, and keeps the toy because the toy was always his. A girl who bowls leg spin at a wicket painted on a wall grows up to pour the sherbet and take whichever glass is left. A bus driver takes her vehicle through floodwater at the speed of a man walking, then leans out and tells an auto driver to go home and cook. A young wife’s brother arrives every few months with a mixer grinder, then a pressure cooker, then a washing machine and an air conditioner, and the whole colony understands why, and nobody says it.

The man watching all this is no witness.

He is the one who sat with his knees drawn up on a chair, complaining about the heat, while the floor was swept around him. The one who knew exactly where his wallet was while she held the tap. The one who said nothing when he was asked to say something.

Nine times he notices, and notices late.

The tenth time, he watches his own cousin, in a kurta ironed and laid out for him, being walked up and down for strangers.

Realising that something is wrong is easy. You can do it in a minute, about somebody else’s house.

About The Author 

Spandan Kundu is a computer science graduate of IIT (ISM) Dhanbad. He builds artificial intelligence systems that have not been built before, and spends his evenings on the older, unauthored ones that no engineer designed and everybody maintains.

The conversations people inherit. The expectations they shoulder. The roles handed to them so early, and rehearsed so thoroughly, that nobody remembers the handing over.

Patrealisation, his first book, assembles ten of these ordinary transactions. The largest piece of fish arriving on the wrong plate. Six matching glasses where there were once six mismatched ones. A packet passed across a counter, wrapped in newspaper, unnamed.

The title is a word he had to invent, for want of an existing one. It names what took him years to learn: to find strange the arrangement he had never once thought to question.

His reading is mostly sociology: Naila Kabeer, Uma Chakravarti, Bina Agarwal, Leela Dube and Sudhir Kakar on the interior life of the Indian family. He remains startled that the arrangements he grew up inside have names.

He grew up in Dhanbad, in a family with roots in Kolkata and a village house in Bengal, and writes about the interiors he knows: kitchens, local trains, drawing rooms arranged for visitors, the half hour of a lunch break and the backbiting that comes with it.

His narrators are men who notice late, which he takes to be the honest vantage, and the only one he can claim.

Almost nobody in these stories protests.
The acquiescence is the subject.