of frontline observation and lived history
“You are thefirst doctorto touch me.”
Mapusa, Goa · 1989
A memoir · A witness · A promise
InfectiousIntimacies
Stories from the Frontlines of HIV, Humanity, and Hope
A global adult work of narrative nonfiction—told from Mumbai’s wards, streets, courtrooms, classrooms, and communities.
for general readers across cultures and professions
available in a focused browser reading room
The heart of the book
“The virus was never the whole story. The people were.”
The book begins with medicine but keeps widening: into family, shame, desire, law, language, courage, and the private decisions through which public history is lived.
Its subject is HIV. Its larger concern is intimacy—what people reveal, conceal, fear, endure, and offer one another when the world turns away.
Inside the book
Private lives. Public consequences.
Each chapter opens a different room in the same human story.
Taking Sexual History
Navigating the Conversation
How doctors earn truth when shame and fear enter the room.
Stories of Survival, Struggle, and Stigma
Kamathipura
Lives shaped by sex work, economics, disease, and dignity.
Exploring Sex Addiction
Beyond Desire
Compulsion, secrecy, treatment, and the limits of moral judgement.
The Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children
Stolen Childhoods
A direct confrontation with exploitation and institutional failure.
When Watching Crosses the Line
Voyeurism Exposed
Consent, privacy, violation, and the harms hidden behind silence.
India's Hijra Legacy
Breaking the Binary
Gender, community, public health, and social exclusion.
“Pregnant? How’s that possible?”
Opening line from the free chapterRead before you decide
From Taboos to Textbook
Sex Education in India
Read the complete sample in a distraction-free, adjustable reading mode. Free: share an email or mobile number and it opens in your browser. No account, no payment.
The living archive
The book is the story. The archive is the wider record.
Care
Clinical work, early HIV care, and the insistence that treatment begins with listening.
Community
Peer leadership and health communication shaped around the people it was meant to serve.
Rights
A record of how law, stigma, fear, and public policy can enter the consulting room.
Communication
The campaigns, language, and cultural routes that helped public-health knowledge travel.
Forthcoming
The official edition is being prepared for release.
The Amazon link is intentionally inactive until the ISBN, final files, and KDP listing are confirmed. The free chapter and archive remain available in the meantime.