South Asia and Sexuality: Still | Here

Abstract

What are you looking for? I grew up in a directionally challenged world. Bombay, the city of my birth, and Mumbai, the city of my return(s), requires an attention, indeed an attachment, to mis/direction. A casual stranger’s request for walking directions will inevitably summon places lost and found. To arrive at a destination, you must first lose your way, navigate the folds of spaces and histories that rarely recede out of view. That building you seek, one is often told, lives next to another building that was long demolished, even as its loss endures as the only map of the present. As my Bahujan poet Baba used to say, GPS in India is aaplya manachi akanksha / an aspirational techné, an imaginary shorthand that promises Grand Places Soon.