From late 2015 through early 2016, a new vector-borne epidemic swept across the Americas, the Pacific, and much of Southeast Asia, bringing new attention to questions of connection across different spaces, species, and sociopolitical orders. Like both dengue and West Nile, Zika virus is passed from person to person by mosquitoes, primarily Aedes aegypti.

On July 25th, 2017, a Chinese “incursion” into a Himalayan pasture land called Barahoti was widely reported by the Indian media.[1] Coming in the wake of a tense Himalayan border fracas to the east of Barahoti in a place called Doklam that is located at the tri-junction of India, China, and Bhutan, the claims of yet another territorial breach provoked an uproar in India’s increasingly hyper-nationalistic news media.

On the 7th of October 2018, without warning, a sinkhole opened under a busy footpath in Dazhou City in south-west China. Four people fell in and were killed, only two bodies were retrieved. Three weeks later, CCTV footage in south-east Turkey captured an image of two women falling into a sinkhole that opened underneath them. Miraculously, they both survived without any serious injuries.

One winter morning red dust spiraled from the surface of a broken road. It rapidly gathered volume as a convoy of border-patrol jeeps whizzed past India’s newly constructed border wall with Bangladesh. This infrastructure encloses significant stretches of the 2545-mile-long India-Bangladesh border, South Asia’s longest international boundary. Unlike the rusty fences and fence-like structures that had earlier divided this landscape, the new barrier was distinguished by furiously coiled barbed wires that were placed between angular iron frames.

Despite enfolding several Indian battalions within its hills, the border town of Uri had none of the buzz that I imagined would characterize the “garrison-entrepot” (Roitman 1998). Until the recent release of a Bollywood military-action film titled Uri:The Surgical Strike, the name Uri did not command the kind of patriotic charge associated with places like Kargil or Siachen, symbols of heroic confrontation with Pakistan in the war-map of Kashmir.