Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay 
Panty 

Darkly glamorous and fiercely erotic heroines take the centre stage in these two novellas. In Panty, when a mysterious young woman arrives in Calcutta and moves into a guesthouse, she finds in an otherwise empty wardrobe a soft and silky panty in leopard-skin print. She thinks the woman who wore it must have possessed a wild sexual nature. A sensation of companionship envelops her; the sexual lives of the two women begin to mingle and blur. In Hypnosis, another young woman a TV journalist on perpetual night duty has an unconsummated but passionate affair with a famous musician that leaves her shattered. In a nightmarish sequence of events that follow, she allows herself to be hypnotized and drugged to aid her search for love. Exposing our darkest desires and deepest fears when it comes to love, the effect of Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay s ferocious storytelling is deliciously anarchic and deeply unsettling.