The furniture is minimal: There is a long dining table painted chartreuse and small, bright-blue Chinese peasant cloth pillows sit on two white couches.
But none of this seemed to matter to the short, long-faced, middle-aged man who was now behind the focusing cloth, clattering the shutter furiously in tenth-of-a-second bursts, to take her picture.
The Portuguese navigators who had daringly rounded Cape Bojador in west Africa in 1434 did not take long to seize Goa and then Malacca--the center of a lush trade in cloth and spices.