I Have Immortal Longings in Me

This chapter revisits the questions regarding HIV raised in the introduction in light of the materials that have been discussed in the chapters. It attends to the form of risk-taking that was inevitable for hijras in the available local moral worlds. I juxtapose it with the risk-taking that public-health authorities discourage in order to measure the distance between the kind of life imagined by the HIV discourse and the one that is lived in rural Orissa. The conclusion presses my ethnographic elaboration and challenge to both public-health discourse and the recent movements in queer theory that focus on temporality and notions of the future. The chapter argues that love affairs with hijras in some of the poorest districts of India can be seen to transform the experience of time: from a cruel, unforgiving grind directed toward an inevitable abject future to an effervescent present.