Synopsis

Told through the voice of a child, this family chronicle can be read in two ways. It's the unsentimental portrait of a father who decides to stand, at all costs and at every moment of his life, by the side of his son, sentenced to a long prison sentence: a very ordinary hero of heroism without deeds, for him his son has become a kind of incarnation of the truest human condition. Or it's the memory of a normal childhood, in a completely normal family, raised by his father, a railway worker, his uncle, a carpenter, his mother, a schoolteacher, and his childless aunt, raising Bengalis. His habits are normal, but within him radiates a kind of enchantment—his brother's imprisonment—that transfers this normality to another "planet.".