This paper tries to understand how ethnographic writing through its staging of quotidian encounters can foreground choices of friendships and uncover unequal positionalities. The larger analytical perspective that I am interested in understanding is how ethnographic writing can highlight unreconciled temporal differences between ethnographic work and consequently the production of authentic ethnographic texts (Fabian 2014) which endeavour to relate emplaced positionalities. It tries to weave together the different historical genealogies of socioreligious collectives which work with migrant students hailing from different ethnolinguistic communities from the distinct states of what is problematically known as Northeast India in Delhi. Echoing the work of Lal Dena (1998), Darliensung (2013), Songate (1956), and L Sangkima (2006), my paper tries to understand how historical collective bodies were at the forefront of redefining belongingness back home in their respective states in Northeast India. It draws theoretical inspiration from Neihsial (1984) and Ngaihte and Paulianding (2022) and suggests that associational bodies which work closely with communities, reflect their beliefs and are also expressive of their agency and how they themselves wish to identify themselves (Suan, 2011). Following the footsteps of scholars like Zehol (1989) and Puia (2018) it then tries to understand the different processes through which distinct socioreligious bodies and associational spaces work together to re-entrench their ethnolinguistic identities in relation to other communities with whom they had formerly shared clan relationships, however post- independence perceive themselves as different. How do these spaces then impinge on the subjectivities of migrant students from different states of the region in Delhi who make particular choices in terms of friendships? Lastly, by collaborating and sharing time with an upper caste Assamese researcher like myself, how do they live vicariously through the collaborative ethnographic text? The paper also asks how does collaboration gets redefined amidst hierarchical relationalities within the region.