Desire and devastation

Part of the Women Translating Women project, this novel skillfully navigates through the uncomfortable terrain of women's choices under patriarchy, writes Anjali Chauhan.

What lies buried in a woman’s heart — a longing, a wound, a rebellion? In Hidden Treasure, Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay digs deep into this question through a searing tale of desire and devastation.

Translated from the Bengali by Ipsa S, the novella is part of the Women Translating Women project, a joint initiative of the Ashoka Centre for Translation, the Sushama Bedi Memorial Fund, and Zubaan Publishers. The project seeks to foreground regional women’s voices by translating their work across Indian languages, thus building cross-cultural feminist solidarities. Hidden Treasure is a compelling addition to this vision — one that refuses neat conclusions and instead revels in the murky, often uncomfortable terrain of women’s choices under patriarchy.

Set in a rented portion of a devout, upper-caste Hindu household, Hidden Treasure follows Chintamoni, a woman from a lower-caste leading a life of relentless labour and quiet desperation. Her days are consumed by domestic drudgery, her marriage to an unremarkable man is devoid of intimacy, and her nights are haunted by the fragility of her son’s health. The spaces she inhabits — cramped rooms, rat-infested kitchens, piles of old junk — are not just physical but deeply metaphorical. They mirror her internal state: burdened, repressed, and suffocated by poverty and expectations.

Chintamoni is a hoarder, we are told early on. She is unable to throw away even the most broken or unusable of objects. This hoarding becomes a metaphor for her life: clinging to past desires, stifled dreams, and the bare hope of something more.

When Kalishankar, a mysterious and brooding devotee of Ma Kali, arrives as a tenant, something stirs in her. He notices her. She notices him noticing her. What begins as a forbidden glance soon flowers into an illicit affair — one that brings not just physical satisfaction, but gold. Literally. Kalishankar, we later learn, has stolen jewellery from the temple, and Chintamoni accepts this “hidden treasure,” knowing its questionable origin.

It is here that the novella’s complexity truly emerges. Is Chintamoni’s affair an act of rebellion — a reassertion of bodily autonomy by a woman long denied even the right to desire? Or is it an ethical fall, one driven by desperation and clouded by guilt? Bandyopadhyay refuses to offer easy answers. Chintamoni is neither a villain nor a saint. She is a woman trying to survive in a world governed by religion, men, and money. A world where her every move is scrutinised, every desire shamed, and every act of self-preservation condemned as moral failure.

The stakes are unbearably high. Chintamoni has three children: one daughter she must marry off, another struggling in school, and a son battling illness. Her husband remains emotionally unavailable most times, incompetent to offer her a comfortable life, and she is averse to him sexually, often humiliates him for not being man enough, while her widowed mother-in-law imposes the tyranny of tradition even after she is long gone. Amidst all this, the brief interlude with Kalishankar becomes, for Chintamoni, both an escape and a lifeline. When he vanishes from her life in a rather brutal way, getting murdered, under circumstances too suspenseful to spoil—it is not just a lover she loses, but also the promise of relief, of care, of companionship. The treasure remains. But it brings no peace.

Instead, Chintamoni begins a long descent into psychological ruin. The gold almost eats her alive. She cannot tell anyone about it, she cannot sell it for fear of getting framed in the murder or complicit in Kalishankar’s wrongdoings. She somehow gathers the courage to tell her husband about it, who accuses her of ruining their lives even more. He dies soon after. Her son, too, passes away. Her daughter takes up the burden of providing for the family, her own aspirations withering away in the process.

Chintamoni becomes increasingly unhinged, paranoid, and ghost-like, trapped between the memory of a life she longed to have and the guilt of a treasure hoarded. The novella’s brilliance lies in showing how women’s resistance, when it does not conform to sanitised ideals, can turn tragic, even grotesque. There is no redemption arc here, no triumph of self-actualisation. Only a raw, relentless realism.

What makes Hidden Treasure extraordinary is its refusal to separate the erotic from the economic. The novella interrogates whether transgression, when committed by the structurally oppressed, should be viewed through a different lens. Should we hold women like Chintamoni to the same moral standards as those who never had to choose between starvation and stolen jewellery? Ipsa’s translation does justice to the layered texture of Bandyopadhyay’s prose, capturing both its sensual rhythms and stark brutality. The language is lucid yet emotionally evocative, allowing readers unfamiliar with Bengali to fully inhabit Chintamoni’s world.

Hidden Treasure is a novella that demands to be read slowly, painfully, and reflectively. It resists resolution, much like the lives of women it seeks to represent. In Chintamoni, we find not a heroine, but a mirror — cracked, smudged, difficult to look into, but utterly necessary. Her story urges us to ask uncomfortable questions about desire, ethics, survival, and the invisible costs of womanhood. It is not a tale of empowerment in the liberal, marketable sense. But it is, unmistakably, a story of resistance—in all its messy, complicated glory.