‘Like the warmth from the winter sun, Phukan’s writing warms the cockles of your heart with her emotion-laden storytelling, but leaves you with some harsh realities of life.’—Dipankar Mukherjee
When Jayanta Choudhury returns to Paansgaon after twelve years in America, he expects to stay only long enough to settle his mother’s affairs. But when an opportunity arises to teach at the prestigious Paansgaon Public School, he decides to remain for a while longer. It is there that he meets Renuka Kakoti, a fellow teacher whose quiet, orderly life seems worlds away from his own. Renuka has a husband, a young son and a home she tends with the same care she gives to her garden. But beneath the routines of everyday life lie the small compromises, silences and disappointments of a marriage that has long ceased to be what it once was. As Jayanta and Renuka become friends, their conversations and companionship offer both of them something unexpected.
Then, one August morning, an allegation of sexual assault at the school throws the entire town into turmoil. Suddenly, the carefully maintained boundaries between family, friendship and duty begin to unravel, and Renuka finds herself confronting questions she has spent years avoiding.
Set against the intimate backdrop of small-town Assam where everyone knows—or thinks they know—everyone else’s business, It Happened One August is a perceptive novel about marriage, desire, loyalty and the pressures of living under the constant scrutiny of society.
