Based on his current non-fiction hook project, which has been, in part, inspired by the style and structure of nonfiction books by Maggie Nelson, Ryszard Kapuscinski, and Jamaica Kincaid, this talk traces US-based Hirsh Sawhney's 2005 joumey from the city of Calcutta to a remote part of the eastern lndian state of Orissa, where indigenous peoples are being devastated by multinational corporations and govemment paramilitary forces, which seek to extract aluminium from their mineral rich lands. This joumey to Orissa was prompted by his reading of the acclaimed Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi, whose stories and novels documented the plight of these peoples. The talk is also a personal meditation on literature, class, inequality, and South Asian culture, one that contemplates the formation and utility of the particularized hyphenated identities around which people organize themselves in North America.