Panty is the first book published by our beloved Tilted Axis, and also the title that launched Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay into the stratosphere of the Bengali literary world.
The idea is quite simple: the nameless narrator moves into a new apartment, where she finds someone else’s leopard print panties in the wardrobe. She tries to imagine what kind of life the woman who lived there before could have led, whether she was brave, happy, what her sex life was like. And as it often happens in the work of Sangeeta (you may already be familiar with her other wonderful novel Abandon), the narrative quickly begins to interweave stories of the two women until we are not really sure who is really talking to us.
The writer and her translator, Arunava Sinha, lead us through a non-linear and surreal yet beautiful literary narrative, saturated with sensual, non-vulgar eroticism.
