Goa, Feb. 24 -- The Trotternama was initially scuppered into "free fall" by bad timing, but Sealy's bold debut "refused to sink. Hailed by critics in the first stirrings of an independent literary culture - I like to think it enabled that culture - it kept its head above water. The Great Trotter fell into the Ganda Nala but he's managed very well. Revived at the end of the last century, here he is again. His fate.mirrors that of his progeny. Migrating or staying on, Anglo-Indians would remain poised between the heaven of imagined refuges around the world and the earth of their nurturing here."

That degree of displacement and dispersal may well happen for the Goans at some future juncture, but wandering up the Mandovi with Sealy earlier t...