This presentation is set in the first decade of 2000s when the Indian state had just begun to recognize the fact that queer and transgender communities were vulnerable to HIV. Yet the first case of HIV was detected as far back as 1986 in India. Due to long histories of state apathy, there was no awareness on the virus and queer and transgender folks were dying. Bhattacharya explores how we memorialize those deaths and reckon with the ever-expanding inventory of loss in trans and queer communities because the HIV pandemic is still ongoing. Bhattacharya argues that no such reckoning with HIV is possible without accounting for the grinding actions of care labor that trans and queer communities perform for each other in the face of various institutional violences ranging from stigma due to HIV, medical negligence in public hospitals and transphobia in their everyday worlds. These labors illuminate both the devalued histories of care labor in gender minority communities where care itself is a form of coercion perpetuating histories of caste oppression and the politics of transnational HIV funding in South Asia but that very same care is also what binds these communities together in bonds of friendship, gender affirmation and dignity in the face of routinized violences.