When I first started doing fieldwork in India–this was in the early 2000s and 2010s–I was really interested in communities of folks who have been dispossessed by the state, because the state at the time, continued to keep on the books a law again sodomy. And so I would sit in these interviews and try to ask people these really heady questions about violence or about governmentality or about the state, and why people actively desired its recognition. And all people wanted to tell me about was the kind of fun things that they were doing. About falling in love, desire, cruising, touch, so,  sitting closely with people helped me realize that the questions I was asking were my own questions.

I got started volunteering with organizations that were doing on-the-ground work in Bombay in particular, like condom distribution, bringing clients in for testing services, mostly gender and sexual minorities who are involved in public cruising or sex work. I also volunteered for social organizations who were throwing parties for nightlife or who were organizing pride to sort of help other people instead of just being a kind of extractive anthropologist. People started to become accustomed to seeing my face and then slowly over time, I could tell people, this is the project I'm working on, I would love to talk to you more about this thing that I'm interested in. 

I think part of writing a book is figuring out who exactly you're in conversation with and who your audience is. On the one hand, scholars in Anthropology and in fields  related to South Asia and queer studies. My project is trying to sort of ask, what does it mean that we write about people's lives, while completely excising the searches for desire, for pleasure, for fun, for intimacy that people have. What does it mean that we often reduce people's lives to the precarity that they experience. I'm not the only person doing this.  Ulka Anjaria and John Anjaria put a fabulous volume together in 2020 that was asking this question, how do we think about “maza”, or fun. So I think that's one audience. I think the other audience, and I don't presume to be able to fully accomplish this, but ideally one of my other audiences are a lot of the young queer and trans folks that I'm engaging with in fieldwork. And that's a harder sell because, obviously, I have to write an academic text to get tenure, but also being someone who wants the people who I work with to be able to see themselves in my writing. Very particular stories have been told about LGBTQ+ life outside of the global North and those stories are often about laws, particularly laws that were  inherited or forced upon them by British or European colonialism or American imperialism. And  those stories  of precarity have become the master narratives that are used to pigeonhole people in places like India or in the global South more broadly into these lives of lack or deprivation. I want my book to be able to be a kind of fun and interesting provocation that's like, why do we do this, we talk about people in these ways that are really reductive. And what would it mean for us to actually tell a bigger story. I'd really like my book to be able to speak to folks who are living the lives that I write about but aren't seeing their lives being sort of represented in scholarship.

My next book project is actually a kind of project around race in South Asia.  I'm trying to think about the kind of long and more contemporary histories of African migrants and then sort of enslaved Africans who ended up in India, how those sort of simultaneous histories compel us to think about questions like race, anti-blackness, the global life of anti-blackness in different ways, because we're talking now about the Indian Ocean, which has a sort of different history of the slave trade, a different history around race in which whiteness is in the atmosphere, but not directly present in the same way it is in the  Atlantic. What do some of these words like blackness, anti-blackness mean where, you know, it's Africans and Indians. And so that's another project I'm really excited to start working on. And hopefully COVID will let up, and I can go do field work.