Extract: Fieldwork as a Sex Object by Meena Kandasamy

Read an extract from Meena Kandasamy's new novel, Fieldwork as a Sex Object, where protagonist Amy/Amrita's world begins to reel when a deepfake porno of hers goes viral. As the online world nastily careens into the offline, she reckons with a culture of violent algorithms, digital warfare, rising Hindu supremacy, quick cancellations, and barbed patriarchal structures.

cut, copy, paste

I do not want to open my laptop. I turn my phone back on and click on Twitter.

My worst fears have come true. I have 8,000 new followers. I cannot access my notifications but they are flooded because there is no number, meaning even Twitter has given up counting.

A circle of keyboard trolls with usernames like @aryanalpha!08, jerking off to their saffron-coloured dreams of Hindu supremacy, have already started making memes with me.

In one there is a car at a petrol station with four fuel nozzles pumping a single tank. Another has a screengrab of the same woman sucking dick and, instead of the random faceless dude of the video, they have pasted photos of Rahul Gandhi, Sitaram Yechury, Umar Khalid between his shoulders.

#AmritaChaturvediVideo#AmritaChaturvediNude
#AmritaChaturvediSex#AmyXXX

The hashtags of my name have reached the top ten in India. Soft porn engagement farmers around the world are riding them to hike up their follower counts, plugging obscure links to all sorts of steamy content. The majority lead to Asian/black women with cum all over their faces.

I am no longer a name. I am a trend.

notoriety as the wild-card entry 
to celebrity

My exponential exposure is on WhatsApp, Twitter, random YouTube channels — it is sheer craziness. I’d prepared for fame, not infamy.

Is this what it’s like to be a celebrity?

No, celebrities have money and a PR team. Celebrities have flattering photos to run with the most unsavoury stories. Celebrities can force their mother father aunty cousin exes driver cook cleaner to sign NDAs. Celebrities can wear oversized shades, flashing peace signs to annoying paparazzi. Celebrities can outsource the 
trouble-shooting to some dude-bro’s tech start-up who will trend a face-saving hashtag. Celebrities emerge from their trials stronger, every narrative hijacked and rearranged in their favour.

I am a nobody. I have fuck-all. My once-upon-a-time 15 minutes of fame on reality TV count for nothing. The only thing handed to me on a platter is instant recall. It is like being an early-career Kardashian before the rebrand. It’s like being Mia Khalifa minus the spectacular tits and comeback game (cit: ‘A soldier sells his body to the government’). I’m just here, taking hit after hit.

a story in five acts

Act One

I decide not to go to my mother. Let her learn about my disgrace from some Little India WhatsApp group chat.

She will simply say, I never want to see your face again. You are my karma for all the sins committed in previous births. A firm believer in her own one-and-one-is-two, pattern-recognition capabilities, there is no chance she will buy that it is not me because every phase of my life now constitutes rock-solid evidence that it must be. Whatever I say will not pass for the truth. Her words are already ringing in my head, Of course that’s you — you became a whore at the first opportunity. Who could have prevented that? God knows what evil force has possessed you now.

Act Two

If I run to her, I will give her the chance to deploy all the faux piety and melodrama at her disposal. My mother tries to make every tragedy about herself. Big if-there-is-a-funeral-I-will-be-the-corpse energy. One time, she said she felt a rock sinking and settling into her uterus (yes, she was that specific). Also: a puncture in her lung & face broken out in hives & she was confined to her bed with a sudden onset migraine. This (or an even more melodramatic variation) is what happened to her every time something happened to me. In one single woke word, she was triggered. Please teach me how to politely tell my mother to fuck off (decentre herself) because I am not prepared to watch her push herself to such a state of possession about her impending demise (expedited and fast-tracked by my actions). What I dread most of all is how she will finish by invoking her own death in one of two modes. Either: the day I die will be the day I stop trouble-shooting for this broken family. Or: if I’d died earlier, I would have passed away peacefully without having to witness my daughter become an adult entertainment starlet.

Act Three

The panic attack-inducing question of money stops me from running to my parents for a rescue op. One need not read a treatise on Marxism to understand. I am financially dependent on my parents so, inversely, conversely, morosely, remorsefully, this means they exercise a certain degree of control over my lifestyle. Historically, they have been more than eager to brandish their economic leverage to keep me in line. It is my father who has all the money, of course, but my mother controls the trickle down to me. For every little transgression, I have been required to endure the shameswallowing ritual of nodding to shrill recitations of her favourite mantra: Who sent you to London? Who is paying for your accommodation? Who is giving you a monthly allowance? My parents married me off. Otherwise, I would have gone to Oxford.

Anyone who is inside a safety net knows that there is only one catch: you.

There will be no letting go.

Act Four

Thirty-five years into her marriage, and my mother still feels like an outsider. My father’s family will weave this downfall into a parable of her personal failure to raise a good daughter. God knows my mother has tried, really, really hard. When I was a child, she kept strict tabs to ensure my vegetarianism, hovering around the dining table muttering ‘that’s enough that’s enough’. She believed meat-eating manifested itself in base tendencies. She said white people have savage sex because they eat pig and buffalo. I also overheard her tell a friend on the phone that she stopped sharing a bed with my father to exist at a higher level of consciousness. It was when my paternal cousin, Vivek, and the devil incarnate (his mother and portable cook) came to stay with us that their marriage soured irreversibly. When my mother pushed back against being bossed around by a child, my father told her not to emasculate a young man in his formative years and focus her energies on ensuring that her daughter did not become a common whore. The whole affair left my mother teetering on the verge of a nervous breakdown. In the beginning, she doubled down on her rules and regulations for me. At the end, she strategically fled the scene. Her absence allowed me a free pass of open defiance against these unwelcome guests, and I launched a cold war. My latest misadventure has the power to reignite old fires and wreck the shallow peace treaty.

Act Five

Even if they were to somehow buy into my version of events, they would still upbraid me for having invited such hatred upon myself. What was your reason to create enemies everywhere? Why do you crown yourself the Champion of All Oppressed Peoples? What are you trying to prove? If they are after Muslims, let them be after Muslims! Is it any of your business? Are you one? You have a saviour complex, beta, like these woken people. There are no shortcuts in life, beta: you want overnight stardom by getting involved in childish politics, or like when you went on that glam-glam reality show. None of that will take you anywhere. I sent you to London to study. Are they now giving out degrees for becoming a porn queen? Your high IQ comes with zero common sense!

**

The TL;DR version of this unfolding story of parental coercion in existential terms:

Act One: Henceforth, You Do Not Exist!
Act Two: Forthwith, I Will Not Exist!
Act Three: Thereupon, How Will You Exist?
Act Four: Hereinafter, Must I Exist?
Act Five: Whereas, How You Should Have Existed!

Fieldwork as a Sex Object by Meena Kandasamy is published in hardback on 21 May 2026 by Brazen, Hachette UK.