What is a love story? You’re likely already hearing mandolins in your head and picturing a boy and girl in mustard fields. But it can also be the sweet reminiscence of the first time having sex with a college sweetheart. It can be a boy and a girl standing in the rain, one of them shyly handing over a love letter, while the other musters the courage to tell her he is gay. Sometimes it’s the joy of discovering female friendship and self-love, at other times it’s accepting that friendships can be romantic and sensual too.

Every story in Love, Sex and India (Westland, R399), an anthology of short narratives from the Agents of Ishq (AOI), evades conventional ideas of romance and intimacy. The stories — all first-person, non-fiction accounts and edited by Paromita Vohra, filmmaker, writer and founder of AOI — are pulled from the repository of Agents of Ishq, a digital media project which recently marked its 10-year anniversary in December 2025. It had launched in 2015 with the dream of bringing sex-positive conversation to the mainstream. A decade on, AOI’s Instagram page (@agentsofishq) has nearly 44,000 followers, and hundreds of posts about all matters of the heart, from sex and masturbation, to friendship and heartbreak, to kink and situationships, to even grim accounts of sexual assault and exploitation. Each of these stories has been volunteered by AOI followers, sharing their most intimate memories that defy binaries and taboo.