Golden Goa

Rats, 16th century poets, and India on 3 bucks a day? Golden Goa recounts
Grant Buday's travels in India by paralleling them with those of sixteenth-
century Portuguese soldier and poet Luis de Camoens. Camoens, author of the
Portuguese national epic The Lusiads, spent fourteen years in India in the
1500s. Between 1979 and 1999 Buday visited India five times in pursuit of the
story of the Portuguese. A magical, exquisite narrative, reminiscent both of
the travel writing of Paul Bowles and Michael Ondaatje's Running in the
Family, this book takes you to the island of Diu, won by the Portuguese from
the navy of Suleiman the Magnificent. Visiting Goa, Buday meets the Rodrigues
family, people who inhabit a two-hundred-year-old house full of history and
rats. (Goa was once the jewel in the crown of the Portuguese Empire, and the
saying went that he who had seen Goa need not see Lisbon.) Throughout his
journeys Buday encounters those who wish the Portuguese would come back - and
those who are very glad they're gone. A comic, vivid, and moving story, Golden
Goa takes you from Darjeeling in the east, to Jaisalmer in the west, to Cochin
in the south. It explores Mother Teresa's Calcutta, the Dalai Lama's
Dharamsala, and the Poona of Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh. Along the way, Buday is
train wrecked, rat bit, badgered, and ripped off. Mostly, though, he's
delighted.