Aids Sutra: unknown stories of India. An anthology in which 16 of India’s bestknown writers went on the road to cover a human
story behind the AIDS epidemic in the country. With an introduction by Bill and Melinda Gates and a
foreword by Amartya Sen, the writers include Salman Rushdie, William Dalrymple, Kiran Desai, C S
Lakshmi, Amit Chaudhuri, Sunil Ganguly, Mukul
Kesavan, Shobhaa De, Nikita Lalwani, Nalini Jones,
Sonia Faleiro, Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi, Aman
Sethi, Jaspreet Singh and Siddharth Deb.

Here is Vikram Seth’s poem on AIDS

I shall die soon, I know.
This thing is in my blood.
It will not let me go.
It saps my cells for food.

It soaks my nights in sweat
And breaks my days in pain.
No hand or drug can treat
These limbs for love or gain.

Love was the strange first cause
That bred grief in its seed,
And gain knew its own laws—
To fix its place and breed.

He whom I love, thank God,
Won’t speak of hope or cure.
It would not do me good.
He sees that I am sure.

He knows what I have read
And will not bring me lies.
He sees that I am dead.
I read it in his eyes.

How am I to go on—
How will I bear this taste,
My throat cased in white spawn—
These hands that shake and waste?

Stay by my steel ward bed
And hold me where I lie.
Love me when I am dead
And do not let me die.
All photos courtesy TOI