Panty

A young woman arrives alone in Kolkota, an unfamiliar city in which she knows no-one, and moves into a guesthouse. Her sense of identity already shaken, when she finds a worn pair of leopard print panties in the otherwise-empty wardrobe she begins to fantasise about their former owner, whose imagined life comes to blur with and overlap her own. Darkly glamorous and ferociously erotic, Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay’s writing is reminiscent of Katherine Anne Porter’s fever dreams or the surreal paintings of de Chirico. Credited with being ‘the woman who reintroduced hardcore sexuality into Bengali literature’, Bandyopadhyay may be sensational but she is never superficial, with her feminism encompassing debates on religion and nationhood as much as sexuality.