When classical Indian epistemologists questioned why a rope might be mistaken for a snake, philosophers argued that such flawed perception was due to "half-knowledge" rather than full ignorance. In the foreword to this anthology, the economist Amartya Sen writes that it is a lesson pertinent to our skewed understanding of an illness that affects three million people in India. The book is by 16 new and established Indian writers who have been dispatched to vulnerable communities to gather stories about Aids. As well as reportage, there is recollection from people who have discovered that those close to them are infected - such as Shobhaa De, who gives an intimate account of how she was thrown into ethical and emotional turmoil by the discovery that her children's driver had HIV. In a story that exposes India's class divide, it is only with his death that she ceases to view him as invisible.
Like Shobhaa De, many are initially possessed by a deeply ingrained cultural fear and prejudice, but find that exposure to the reality of Aids teaches them to view sufferers not as "stray dogs" without value or voice, but as human.
The challenge of conveying extreme suffering without sentimentalising, sensationalising or simplifying is met in this collection of wide-ranging voices, both emotive and meditative. Poetry is the preferred medium in Vikram Seth's haunting lament, "Soon". Sonia Faleiro's urgent, stark account reveals the physical torment of the abused, the smell of dried blood on a sari. Siddhartha Deb discovers the mental torture of boredom that contributes to drug addiction in the impoverished, isolated hill district of Manipur. Salman Rushdie vividly depicts the hurt and humiliation of "hijras", transgenders in Mumbai. In Kiran Desai's account of jungle sex workers, who are condemned by taboo to silence, some solace is gained by gazing into the Godavari river - "wide enough, pale enough to soothe difficult human emotions".
Sufferers often become isolated - physically and emotionally, but also legally and linguistically by being denied the "basic structural blocks of life" of home and job. Aids Sutra also picks out the imprecise words, loopholes in the law, to which the vulnerable and voiceless fall victim: for example, the definition of "indecent" is, in the Bombay Police Act (1951), left to the officer's discretion. When a sex worker, Savita, was unable to pay an arbitrary 1200 rupee fine - a week's earnings - she was brutally ordered "Then suck it", forcing her to give the policeman oral sex.
Not all survive, and their anguish is unflinchingly documented. "How do I disappear?", asks an infected doctor. Some do so by walking into the sea, lying across train tracks, refusing treatment and thus committing "suicide in slow motion".
However, Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi writes that "Illness, when survived, furnishes profound questions and inspiring conclusions". Some do gain a deeper sense of the value of life, and the book is dedicated to "the community members who stood up and gave voice", such as Radhika, a sex worker who became a counsellor, sharing her story and gaining priceless self-respect. The anthology - published in collaboration with Avahan, the India Aids Initiative of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation - shows how storytelling can help create life-saving "fellow-feeling".
