I landed in Rio de Janeiro on a hot and humid November evening. November being late spring in that part of the world, I was not expecting that kind of weather. This is just a statement, not a complaint.

            The hotel I had booked through the Internet was only two blocks away from the world-famous Copacabana beach. The beach-front hotels have a spectacular view of the Atlantic. I intend to stay in one of them on my visit to Rio after winning the New York Lotto.

            Soon after checking into the hotel, I went out for a walk. The streets were crowded. Most people looked jolly and happy. The light rain that had been falling for some time failed to keep them indoors or dampen their spirits. If anything, it made them appear bolder, the wet clothes making the contours of certain parts of their bodies more pronounced. That was more so in the case of women many of whom had hardly anything on.

            I walked into a convenience store to pick up a bottle of water. The store owner didn’t speak any English. But I could see that he was anxious to say something. And I knew it had nothing to do with the price of the bottled water I picked up. By the time I paid it, he found a way of getting over the language barrier. "Mahatma Gandhi, Indira Gandhi," he said and shook my hand. But for my ignorance of the Portuguese language, I would have convinced him that the latter, though she shared a surname with the former, was a disgrace to him. Through gestures and an "yes" answer, I let it be known to him that he correctly identified my country of origin. I knew that was all what he meant by what he said.

            My next stop was at a restaurant. I was happy to see that the food there was served buffet-style and paid for by weight. I could pick what I saw and be sure of what I was eating. No waitress would have to punish herself trying to figure out what I was ordering. [I didn’t see any waiter there.]

Ravi Shankar and Kama Sutra

            I had just started enjoying the food and the ambiance when I saw a couple sitting two tables away staring at me--in an admiring sort of way--and saying something. I smiled at them and they smiled back. After a few more minutes of staring and smiling, the man came up to me and handed a napkin on which he had written: "Ravi Shankar very good." I nodded in agreement and felt happy that the Indian sitar maestro was popular even among ordinary South Americans.

            He sat by my side and soon the woman also joined. They both looked in their twenties. Both spoke a few words of English. But the expressions on their faces conveyed more than words did. They conveyed, or I thought they did, that both of them admired India and things Indian very much. We spent a happy one hour together, with laughs, gestures and signs more than making up for our linguistic shortcoming. When I was about to leave, the man said, "Kama Sutra, good." That made his girlfriend laugh loudly, inviting the attention of those sitting at the nearby tables.

            How do I know that she was his girlfriend? The moment he introduced her to me as his wife, she hastened to make it clear: "No, girlfriend."

            Maybe there was a message for me in what she said. But I was too tired to hang around and find out. Moreover, I was booked to go on a conducted tour of the city early the next morning.

            Little did I know as I was walking toward the hotel that another exhilarating experience was waiting for me there. As I entered the hotel lobby, I saw a group of people chatting. One of them came toward me and introduced himself as Aloisio. "I am the owner of this hotel," he said. He skipped the usual "Are you from India?" question I am accustomed to hearing from foreigners and straight away came to the point: "Which part of India are you from?" I was impressed.

            "From Kerala, which is on the southwestern corner of the country," I said. I could sense the direction the conversation was going to take. My present status as a New York resident was of little relevance to it. So I decided not to mention it for the time being.

            "I know where Kerala is," he said. "How far is your home town from Calicut?"

            The question took me by surprise. I was not expecting it from a hotel owner in Brazil. He gave me a warm handshake, as if I had delivered him a gift, when I told him that Calicut was my home town. I also told him that the place had been officially renamed Kozhikode, which was its original name.

            Not wanting to be out of step with the rest of the Third World, India has lately been restoring place names, which were changed by colonial powers to suit their palate, to their original ones. In doing this, Indian leaders have at times stretched their nationalistic (parochial?) zeal to ridiculous levels. Bombay is now called Mumbai, Calcutta Kolkata, Madras Chennai and so on. Aloisio thanked me for the update. He also tried to pronounce ‘kozhikode’ correctly a few times and then gave up.

            "Don’t feel bad," I told him, "Even non-Malayalee Indians have difficulty pronouncing it correctly. Malayalee, by the way, is one who speaks Malayalam and Malayalam is the language of Kerala. There is no equivalent in most languages in the world to the Malayalam letter represented by ‘zh’ in ‘kozhikode’. We can go into all that some other time. First tell me where your interest in Calicut comes from."

Cabral Started for Calicut, But Ended Up in Brazil

            It came from his interest in history. By a quirk of circumstances, Calicut got linked to the history of Portuguese colonization of Brazil. He summed up that link this way: "Do you know that if Cabral had not lost his direction, while on his way to Calicut, Brazil would not have become a Portuguese colony?"

            He was being flippant about an important phase in Portugal’s overseas expansion. But the question, however, gave an interesting turn to our conversation.

            Pedro Alvarez Cabral led the second Portuguese expedition to Calicut. The first one was led by Vasco da Gama who reached there on May 17, 1498. As a mission whose goal was "to seek Christians and spices," to quote da Gama’s own words, it was a failure. The Arabs, who controlled the entire Indian Ocean trade at the time and who had a monopoly over the spice trade of Calicut, put all sorts of obstacles on the Portuguese path. With a view to overcoming the Arab obstacles, they formidably armed the second expedition and put it under the command of an able navigator, Pedro Alvarez Cabral.

            With 13 ships and 1,200 "boldest and most famous seamen of the century" on board, Cabral left Lisbon for Calicut on March 9, 1500. Unfortunately, he did not have a smooth sail. On April 25, he found himself on the coast of Brazil. There are two versions to how it happened. One goes like this: Anxious to avoid the calm of the west coast of Africa that had considerably slowed the voyage of his predecessor, Cabral went in a decidedly southwesterly direction and realized his mistake only when he spotted a land that did not fit the description of his destination which, of course, was Calicut. The new land he spotted later came to be called Brazil.

            The second version is that before he could veer his fleet round the Cape of Good Hope, a storm drove it off, all the way to the coast of Brazil. More historians have found this version plausible, mainly because of the recurrence of storms in that region. It was for that reason that the Portuguese called the southern tip of Africa the Cape of Storms until, after its rounding by Bartholomew Diaz in 1488, they renamed it the Cape of Good Hope.

            Surprisingly, it was a storm that had accidentally brought Diaz around the tip of Africa, thus paving the way for the epochal discovery of the sea route from Europe to the East. Alas, another storm, 12 years later, not far from the same place, drove the Portuguese fleet destined for the East away from its chosen path! It is an irony of fate that one of the ships on Cabral’s fleet that were destroyed by the storm was commanded by the same Bartholomew Diaz.

            Be that as it may, the serendipitous discovery of Brazil by the Portuguese proved to be a boon to their king back home. On behalf of his king, Cabral took possession of the new land by erecting a cross and holding a religious service. The service was conducted by Father Henrique, a Franciscan priest whom Cabral had brought along.

            He resumed his voyage on May 3 and finally reached Calicut on September 13, 1500. [According to some historians the date was August 30.]

            The hotel owner was well versed with all facts up to the point Cabral left Brazil and continued hip voyage for Calicut. He wanted to know what happened to him after that and why Calicut did not become a Portuguese colony. I filled him in on that to the extent I could draw on my memory:

            The first thing Cabral did after reaching Calicut was to send ashore a local fisherman, whom Vasco da Gama had captured during his visit, with a message for the king, the Zamorin. [’Zamorin,’ again, is the anglicized form of the Malayalam word, Samoodiri, meaning the lord of the sea.] In the caste-ridden society of the time, that was considered an insult. Nonetheless, the Zamorin’s representatives negotiated with the Portuguese. After two and a half months’ negotiations, the Portuguese were given permission to build a factory at Calicut. [A factory in those days just meant a trading post under the supervision of a factor.]

Fight With Arabs for Control of Indian Ocean Trade

            The favorable treatment given to the Portuguese annoyed the Arabs. Fearing loss of the monopoly trading position they had been enjoying for centuries, they caused all sorts of problems for the Portuguese and made it impossible for them to function. A frustrated Cabral captured an Arab ship that was loading at the port. In retaliation, the Arabs, with the help of some local men, attacked and destroyed the Portuguese factory. Factor Ayres Correa and 53 of his assistants were killed. Cabral, in turn, destroyed ten large Arab ships. He also captured 600 sailors from other ships who had nothing to do with the Arab-Portuguese conflict and slaughtered them. After bombarding Calicut for two days, Cabral sailed away. What happened at Calicut had international ramifications. It marked the beginning of a prolonged war by the Portuguese for the control of the Indian Ocean trade.

            Aloisio was intensely attentive to my narration. I was getting late for bed. Otherwise, I would have gone on and on. Before calling it a night I shook his hand and said, "History is full of accidental happenings that permanently altered its course. Your reference to how Brazil accidentally became a Portuguese colony reminds me of what some say about how India became a British colony. According to them, if only the Dutch had not upset the merchants of London by increasing the prince of pepper from three shillings to six shillings a pound, there would not have been an East India Company and India would never have become an English colony."

            "Oh, Oh," he said, "that’s very interesting. I want to hear more about that part of the story. It calls for another session." He thought for a few moments and then said, "I am taking my wife and son and a couple of friends out boating this Saturday. Please join us. We will have a good time." I told him I would and gave him a hug.

            My first day in Brazil was an ecstatic experience.

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