Shane is a sixth-year graduate student completing a dissertation based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork in Vrindavan, India, in an ashram for women living unattached to men. His work explores the category of “widowhood,” a signpost that allowed women to enter and live in this ashram, but that often failed to describe the world of the ashram itself, or the deeply felt differences among the people who lived there. If not through the prism of “widowhood,” then, a category of person that indexes a relationship to absent men and to the state’s promise of caretaking for the vulnerable, how did women in this ashram imagine and make sense of they are, were, and might yet become?