At every International AIDS Conference, set apart from the meeting halls where science and politics battle, there’s a place called the Global Village.

aidssutraIt’s a fleeting community where HIV-positive people and their advocates create a week-long DMZ free of stigma. The vibe is equal parts cultural exhibition and carnival sideshow. Giant strolling condoms are perennial mascots.

The village in Mexico City this year also featured a literary lounge where visitors could hear readings from the book: “AIDS Sutra: Untold Stories from India.” The pungent chili-colored hardcover I reviewed contains 16 pieces– essays, stories and poetry - by contributors including Salman Rushdie, Kiran Desai and Vikram Seth.

There’s an introduction by Bill and Melinda Gates, whose foundation-funded Avahan India AIDS Initiative organized the book. It’s being published by Random House. Proceeds from the book will go to a fund to support children affected by the epidemic.

A foreword by Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen tries to make sense of the vast and shifting estimates of AIDS’ impact on the world and India. He tartly observes the CIA’s wildly off base National Intelligence Estimate of 20 million cases of AIDS in India by 2010 “showed how easily an organization dedicated to intelligence can fail to give much evidence of it.” The UN’s 5 million estimate for HIV/AIDS in India was halved last year to between 2 and 3 million, he adds.

The writers here offset the numbing anonymity of numbers with portraits of stunning particularity. In Nikita Lalwani’s “Mister X Versus Hospital Y,” we meet Toku, a quiet physician who cares for AIDS patients and went to court to fight for the right to confidentiality of HIV test results — his own.

In “Love in the Time of Positives,” Nalini Jones introduces Jayanthi, a young woman who was rushed into an arranged marriage with an older tractor driver who left her an HIV-positive widow. Jayanthi and her peers talk about courtship, remarriage and family with the virus as a permanent houseguest.

In “The Half-Woman God,” Salman Rushdie educates us about the hijras, India’s gender-bending demi-deities who offer blessings at family celebrations and blend ancient tradition with 21st Century risk.

Vikram Seth, author of “A Suitable Boy,” contributed a poem as time capsule of AIDS in the 1980s called “Soon.” The speaker isn’t Seth, he stresses in an accompanying essay, noting he’d been relatively chaste, tested negative, and observant of safe behavior ever since. Seth’s patient, tethered by tubes to a metal hospital bed, considers his imminent death by HIV. Like Thom Gunn’s “The Man With Night Sweats,” Mr. Seth couples love and grief in the era before effective treatment.

Now in India, as elsewhere, there is better testing, medical treatment, and a vibrant prevention movement that treats people not as passive recipients of care but as participants in it.

The writing in the anthology is by turns tortured and beautiful as writers show us the people behind stereotypes.

Author Sonia Faleiro, told me in an interview that she worked months to report and write her harrowing story “Maarne Ka, Bhagane Ka,” (”Beat them, kick them out”), profiling Savita, a streetwalker bludgeoned by railway police for distributing protection to her coworkers in the trade that gives them “frail armour against destitution.”

This is a world I glimpsed in 2004 when I reported a story from Delhi and Mysore truck stops and brothel-based clinics opened by the Gates Foundation. I didn’t meet Savita but her sister in the trade, Prathima, who was sold into the life by a dishonest job broker. From living on a sidewalk, she raised herself to become a community leader. Under a saffron sunset, I accompanied her team inviting women soliciting on street corners to the clinic.

In “AIDS Sutra,” I took a refresher course in the lessons she taught.

Photo: Random House