Chapter 6: Flat Claps and Dengue Fever: A Story of Ethnographies Lost and Found in India

This chapter describes the author’s experience with a lost opportunity to learn about and from Hijra communities in India. While the author was forced to leave the field, and ethnography was ‘lost’ before it could truly begin, the author was able to learn from the experience and translate the questions and ideas generated there into a way to frame and energise new work at home in the United States. The chapter begins with a description of the proposed research context and the circumstances that led to the author’s early departure. This is followed by lessons and reflections gleaned from the experience, and recommendations that ethnographers enter and write about the ‘messy’ field and write in ways that welcome serendipity, honour intuition and value their own and others’ humanity.