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COVID-19 and its associated disease control measures have greatly altered everyday life. The burden of these challenges has fallen disproportionately on women. Drawing on qualitative inquiry in agrarian north India and Nepal, this research note analyzes how South Asian COVID-19 lockdowns have affected women's labor responsibilities in sometimes surprising ways. We find increased responsibilities for caregiving within the household, substantial stress in responding to food insecurity, and growing expectations to fulfill public roles in disease response measures. However, we also find that the return of male migrants and youth has, in some cases, reduced women's farming responsibilities and created opportunities for household togetherness at a time of great uncertainty. We conclude that more research is needed to examine the nuanced aspects of COVID-19's gendered labor impacts to create comprehensive policy responses to address the multiple and sometimes conflicting effects the lockdown has had on agrarian women's informal labor and well-being.

The broad success of development initiatives and ensuing material prosperity in rural areas of the Indian Himalayas have seen an increasing number of families route their increased surpluses to nearby urban areas in search of speculative footholds. Yet, the region continues to be viewed as essentially rural by policy and academic literatures. This article critiques this association by focusing on social-spatial change in the town of Banjar in the Kullu district of Himachal Pradesh. We turn our attention to the stories of property and infrastructures that connect households, contractors, workers and materials, as well as the collectives that emerge or are reconfigured alongside these built environments. The article shows how upward mobility is accompanied by new susceptibilities, how an unlikely and understudied set of agents drives urban change in the absence of formal planning and how inherited hierarchies are being renegotiated through everyday practices to produce what we call 'contoured urbanism', or the uneven but geographically situated form of urbanisation in parts of the Himalayan region. The article makes the case for critical urban research as a productive entry point into debates on regional futures.