Enakshi Sengupta’s The Silk Route Spy is billed as a “true story” of her husband’s grandfather, Nandlal Kapur, who simultaneously spied for the British Raj and helped the Indian independence movement in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. It is a story passed down from Nandlal Kapur to his grandson Vijay Kapur, who in turn conveyed what he recalled to the author. 

No animal has had as profound an impact on human history as the horse. The journey begins in prehistory, with a small, shy animal that humans hunted for food. Hunters domesticated the horse in order to ensure a supply of meat and, later, mare’s milk, which is more nutritious than cow’s milk. This was a watershed event for both species, transforming the horse from an animal fleeing at a gallop from the mere smell of humans into the most valuable of their livestock. The horse’s need to roam far and wide for pasture prompted the horse herders to spread out across the Eurasian steppe. Then herders learned to ride horses in order to keep up with their far-flung herds; this changed the course of history.

Magdaragat is Filipino for “seafarer” or “mariner.” Its dictionary meaning is straightforward enough, and even those with only cursory knowledge of the lands colonially known as “the Philippines” will understand why one would choose that word as the title for an anthology of Filipino diasporic writing. After all, the Philippines is an archipelago of approximately 7,000 islands in the South Pacific; the sea, as both literal and metaphorical entity, has dominated Filipino life—economically, politically, and culturally—since time immemorial.

If India is a woman’s body, her arms outstretched to hold her billion babies, Kashmir is the unruly forelock above her right temple. Or at least, that’s what I thought as a child, when my Nanaji took out his historical maps, pre-Partition and post- , to show me how we had been carved up. Since then, since the internet, I’ve zoomed in on that northwestern border countless times, tracing my fingers over the mess of dotted lines that vaguely indicate where I was born. If you log in from Pakistan, the Kashmir region is labeled as disputed. From India, it is solid line, appearing firmly under Indian control. 

In July 2013, after more than forty years of collecting textiles, I came across something that I had never seen before: a small paper label pasted inside a sample booklet that once belonged to a Calcutta fabric merchant. The brightly colored picture of a man and woman riding a white bull captivated me. What was the story behind it? Where had it been printed? And who were the two Indian figures it depicted—a blue man with a snake wound around his neck and the lady he so tenderly held? Charmed by its stylized simplicity and intriguing image, the collector in me began a quest that, thousands of labels later, continues to beckon.

The first diplomatic mission from Brazil to China took place from 1879-1882; it also included Brazil’s first circumnavigation of the globe (sailing east in this case). An account—Primeira circum-navegação brasileira e primeira missão do Brasil à China (1879) by Marli Cristina Scomazzon and Jeff Franco—has recently been published. This excerpt about the delegation’s stop-over in Hong Kong and Macau has been translated from the original Portuguese and is published with permission.