The birth of the nation in South Asia is inextricably linked to the sundering of our past and our communities along religious lines, a fracturing rehearsed endlessly in the bloodbaths of repeated partitions, riots, and pogroms, in the banality of daily lynchings. For South Asians today, “India” before the Raj is indeed a foreign country. Let me recount a tale from this faraway land, which cannot be located on modern maps, to show how wondrously strange it is.

On 1 April 1597, Gonçalo Toscano was arrested in Portuguese India.1 The Inquisition classified Toscano by “caste” as being “Muslim [mouro], originating from Balaghat [a range of foothills in present-day Maharashtra], freedman [forro], single,” and about twenty-three years of age. Some nine years before, after being baptized and owing to disagreements he had with “his friend,” a certain Matheus Carvalho, he had left the city of Bassein (Baçaim) to return to his hometown of Kalyan (Galiana, near Thane).

Chapter 11 looks at human immunodeficiency viruses other than HIV-1 group M. This includes the other three groups of HIV-1 (groups N, O and P) as well as HIV-2. Their geographic points of origin are identified and an attempt is made to understand their very different fates: from two persons infected (HIV-1 group P) to seventy-eight million (HIV-1 group M). It is concluded that chance and geography played a role (i.e. whether or not the viruses had access to the capital of the Belgian Congo), as well as biological factors (HIV-1 group M being more transmissible). Then HIV-2 is examined: its simian source, geographic distribution, and lower pathogenicity and transmissibility. Through a review of the colonial and post-colonial history of Guinea-Bissau, its epicentre, it becomes clear that iatrogenic transmission must have been the driving force in the emergence of HIV-2. The path of this retrovirus is followed all the way to Goa in Portuguese India, and historical factors support the view that this may have been the first successful exportation of a human immunodeficiency virus outside Africa.