It was one of my regular visits to the house of Mousumi, one of the celas of Meghna, the hijra guru in Hridoypur. Meghna was reclining on the bed while their celas were sitting on the floor. Hijras would often hole up at Mousumi's as their room was spacious and had a television. Nadira, a gothia of Mousumi, brought a ‘dhurpiter chaya masi’—literally, ‘film on fucking’, or porn video, from a local CD shop. In one of the clips, a man was having sex with another man. Pointing to the penis and face of the penetrator, Mousumi started talking about a man they recently had sex with. ‘The face and the penis of the person in the video take after my man,’ they declared, while Mahi, Chottu and Hira, three celas of Meghna, were making erotic cries in a bid to taunt Mousumi. Within minutes the room was abuzz with laughter. Because the room was in the middle of a dense constellation of houses, the television sound was turned off. Although initially they had seemed extremely enthusiastic to watch this clip, the moment the actor who had been penetrated started penetrating, an utter sense of disgust was expressed, with profanities being yelled at not only the actor but also Nadira, who had brought this DVD. The television was switched off immediately and everyone in the room seemed extremely embarrassed.

The ethnographic vignette highlights a moment in the lives of my interlocutors and their exuberant engrossment in a porn video. It clearly shows that despite the popular perception of hijras being asexual, an image hijras themselves reinforce in their interaction with the mainstream, Mousumi spoke gleefully about their desire while the others revelled in playful sexual repartee. More importantly, it indexes a sense of disgust on the part of my hijra interlocutors towards certain types of male-to-male sexual acts. How do hijras negotiate dhurpit, the hijra word for sex and fucking? Why were my interlocutors in the above vignette disgusted? How does erotic desire shape hijra subjectivity? Would my interlocutors have reacted the way they did had I not been present in that room? In other words, did my presence as a normatively masculinized Bangladeshi subject work to prevent them from identifying with those sexual acts that they otherwise publicly denounce?