As Lando, aged ten, emerges from the confessional booth, the reader is already embarked on an epic journey. The crossing of the first European around the Cape of South Africa in 1488 had significantly altered the course of history for part of Asia and much of Africa. The Author conveniently sets the scene with a map and short prologue connecting the dots of history.

The cultural transformation of the people of Goa by the Portuguese, and the enslavement of Africans, particularly to the Americas and the Caribbean, is followed by in 1884, by the parceling of more than eleven and a half...