Much contemporary fiction from Indian Ocean Africa and South Asia turns simultaneously to the past and across the ocean generating alternative cartographies interlinking the Indian Ocean world. This means the past is not simply a background against which their narratives unfold-their historical setting-but the past itself functions as an intertext through which an Indian Ocean world gets reimagined. This talk will examine the rhetoric of loss and recovery in Indian Ocean discourse through an intertextual reading of Mauritian writer Ananda Devi's novel Indian Tango (2005), as a transnational queer rewriting of Satyajit Ray's cinematic adaptation (1984) of Rabindranath.