To begin with, I was confused reading these two novellas as a lot of the reviews I had read mentioned a longer novella, Panty, and a shorter story. My edition, however, starts out with Hypnosis which is twice the size of Panty, which came second. I think the edition published by Tilted Axis is the one which contains Panty and a short story, and mine is the Penguin India edition.

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Panty is a much stranger and more compelling story, to my mind. A woman moves to a guest house to await surgery and finds a pair of discarded, used underwear in the wardrobe. She has brought very few possessions with her and when her period catches her short one day, she's left with no other option than to wear the discarded underwear. When she puts them on, the sex lives of both women begin to intertwine in a surreal dreamlike sequence.

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Although the translation from Bengali by Arunava Sinha was good, I still found some parts of both novellas somewhat opaque, like I was grasping in the dark. Bandyopadhyay has been credited with 'reintroducing hardcore sexuality into Bengali literature', and Panty caused controversy when it was originally published for its explicit portrayal of feminine sexuality and desire.

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The surreal feeling of Panty is heightened by the seemingly random order of the chapters, all numbered but not in order. We see fleeting episodes in a life, or two lives, it's hard to tell. A little boy lost in a house fire, a lice outbreak, a dreamlike encounter on a bus where the woman is the only person of her religion on it. It is difficult, in both novellas, to separate dream from reality, and then in Panty, the lives of two women.

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I'm glad I read both novellas, even if sometimes I was left confused, but I've been looking into Abandon and I think that one sounds like something I'd enjoy more! I’m also making it a 2021 goal (don’t pretend like you’re not thinking of yours) to read at least one book translated from an Indian language a month and I’m excited!