Should circumstantial constraints be given consideration in judgements of ethics and politics, especially when religion and patriarchy collude in making women the brunt of their systemic quandaries? Is conventionally forbidden desire an instrument of defiance when exercised by the marginalised and oppressed? How are we to determine what is “right” and “wrong” when fiction necessarily defies these neat categorisations?
Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay’s novella, Hidden Treasure – translated from the Bengali by Ipsa S – resists straightforward answers to these complex questions. The “hidden treasure” of the title, the guptodhon, is jewellery worth no mean sum, obtained by the protagonist Chintamoni during her liaison with the palm-reader Kalishankar, who himself has stolen it under the pretext of worship from the Kali Temple in Kolkata. The tragic paradox of the story from which is derived its emotional appeal is that this treasure, furtively acquired and carefully shielded from prying eyes, is neither used to generative ends nor forgotten, such that Chintamoni’s life and world come to revolve around it even as she never sells it or benefits from it.
Trapped and troubled
Our introduction to Chintamoni on the very first page of the novel is through the space she inhabits – cramped rooms, rat-infested kitchens, a mess of old junk strewn about – all of which mirrors her state of mind as she drudges on with her unfulfilling, demanding marital life. The first thing we learn about Chintamoni is that she is a hoarder – she “finds it impossible to discard even the oldest and dirtiest of things,” a fact that foreshadows both the repressed desires she secretly clings on to as well as the grit with which she will hold on to the hidden treasure once she gets it.
Bandyopadhyay devotes a page or so to describing Chintamoni as a conventional beauty: slender but not skinny, with flesh in all the right places. One is startled by the divergences of this description from the appalling, unrealistic beauty standards of our own times. Notwithstanding the standards she reasonably adheres to, however, the social mores in which Chintamoni is deeply entrenched are no less patriarchal – the expectations for traditional values her widowed mother-in-law has of her, the deep sexual and emotional dissatisfaction of her marriage, and the worries concerning her three children: one daughter to marry off, another with a disturbing academic record, and a son with fragile health.
Amidst these troubles comes the palm-reader Kalishankar with his ruggedness – the stench of tobacco and sweat resting on his mouth, and his loitering gaze a foil to Chintamoni’s unremarkable but honest husband, Manmatha. The sexual tension between them is established in the act of palm-reading, where Kalishankar takes Chintamoni’s hand in his own trembling ones, a scene immediately reminiscent of Satyajit Ray’s Kapurush, where Amitabha admits that “all this palm-reading was just an excuse to hold your hand.”
Love and loot
The moral ambiguity in Chintamoni’s character comes from her dual rebellion – she both gives herself freely, in an exercise of bodily autonomy, to the object of her desire, Kalishankar, as well as accepts the jewellery he has stolen from the Kali Temple. For she has her and her children’s future to secure – the realisation dawns upon her that “the lure of desire was no less than the lure of money!”
But Chintamoni’s days of pleasure are short-lived. With Kalishankar out of the picture (a mysterious spoiler too significant to be given away here), all that is left behind is the hidden treasure. The rest of the story chronicles what ensues – Chintamoni’s grievous battle against herself and the outside world, which quickly spirals into insanity and moral paralysis. The hidden treasure, coupled with the loss of a promised love, turns Chintamoni into a spectre of her previous self even as her daughter is forced to forgo dreams of a happy married life to slog away and earn money for the family. The son, meanwhile, is a sickly boy prone to disease and illness, the progression which only serves to rupture the fabric of Chintamoni’s existence further.
The question arises: is it some divine retribution, some semblance of the revenge of fate for Chintamoni’s transgressions? Or is it a dark, twisted game of psychology, where the guilty seeks her own punishment in a self-fulfilling prophecy? To our benefit, Bandyopadhyay does not give us answers but only offers space to spawn more questions. One thing, however, is unmistakable: the change in tone from one of youthful exuberance and promise at the beginning of the novella to one of sinister bleakness – attesting to the blurb on the book jacket mentioning Bandyopadhyay’s writing as “acerbic and unsettling” – leaves the reader famished.
Hidden Treasure invites us to consider, even if fleetingly, how things are often only “hidden” and not always “secret” – two common English variations on the Bengali word gupto, also shared by Hindi and allied languages. Bandyopadhyay’s novella is a mediation on the life-worlds of one woman by another.
The translator Ipsa S, a student of literature and cultural theory at the University of Milwaukee-Wisconsin, balances opacity with transparency in their translation of Hidden Treasure, which is steeped in 20th-century Bengali society. There is just the right amount of awkwardness in the language so that the “translatedness” of the novella doesn’t entirely leave the reader’s mind. There is also a certain fluency aiding an uninterrupted reading experience.
It is easy to observe that Ipsa has striven to maintain the taut, politically fraught atmosphere of the social milieu the story is set in, and has also tried to make the story accessible in the register it deserves. Ipsa manages to retain, without making it seem flat or drab, the enchanting lyrical quality of Bandyopadhyay’s Bengali prose which, as Bandyopadhyay herself mentioned in a video recently, draws on a wide range of canonical Western and Bengali poetry. Ultimately, Ipsa’s translation strategies make use of a hyperlocal repertoire of images and linguistic registers while imbuing them with a voice that speaks to the universal, resulting in a compulsively readable work whose foreignness is not hostility but rather an invitation for camaraderie.
Hidden Treasure, Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay, translated from the Bengali by Ipsa S, Zubaan Books.
