My eighty-year old father sits in the small car, hunched and wearied by age. His face registers little interest in the journey ahead to Shiroda. That interest in discovering a historical past to our lives belongs only to my generation in the family. His world is grounded in his present. He doesn't feel the need to find his roots in order to discover himself.

I tremble with momentary anticipation. Over 100 years ago my grandmother Catarina Dias had set forth from Shiroda and resettled in Nuvem. I have never been to Shiroda, neither has my father. I have nothing but a sketchy description of the place read in a book, Goa and the Blue Mountains, rather ironically penned by the English explorer, Sir Richard Francis Burton. To Burton it was a decidedly Hindu town. For me the intrigue began here. A decidedly Hindu town is where my DNA sprung from, yet everything about my upbringing has be so definitively Catholic, leaving little room for alternative interpretations of life. There are those Goans who feel resonance with their Hindu roots. It would be disingenuous of me to profess to be one of them. The village of Nuvem, like so much of coastal Goa, is so thick with Christianity, it reeks of every cultural artefact the Portuguese brought with them. Houses with elaborate altars, wayside crosses, brass bands playing at Sunday feasts, festive tables over laden with pork and beef, a dialect flowing with borrowed Portuguese words, matronly dresses worn by older women, cascading skirts by younger girls, the music, the mannerism, everything has been assiduously doctored to create a curious Western incongruence in the Indian subcontinent, which in my case has deepened through years spent away from Goa. For me to profess that I am a synthesis of sorts would be a falsehood.

Yet, less than an hours drive away from Nuvem, the landscape changes. Tall, towering coconut trees snake their necks into the sky, thick oak and mango trees bask languorously in feeble monsoonal sunlight alongside powdery unidentified blossoms and sugar cane. Houses lie hidden in nooks created by the undulations of hills and the odd rakish monkey swinging from the trees has transported us into another world largely untouched by the scourge of "mega-projects". It is breathtaking. As Burton had promised, the town is decidedly Hindu. We wind our way to the overcrowded market square, where ungainly buses doggedly manoeuvre the roads trying to avoid squatting fruit and vegetable vendors. These are not the stereotypical Hindus, one is brought up to expect in Catholic dominated coastal regions. They are not porcelain skinned Hindus with doe-eyes. They look more like the Catholic Goans I grew up with; smallish, darkish, their saris worn like the kapod my own grandmother wore.

We park our car outside the Kamakshi temple. We elicit little curiosity. They are used to tourists gawking at them. Surely my ancestors would not have been allowed to pray at this temple. It seems counter-intuitive that Christianity has allowed me entry. The human heart remains universal though. I see men and women negotiating with the Divine through offers of coconuts, their hands folded in devotion. Save for the red bhindi between their eyes, they could be Nuvemkars standing in front of portraits of Caucasian Gods. The folded hands of my ancestors had unfolded their hearts at some point in my generational chain in a Catholic Church. From here we make our way to St Joseph's Church.

The white church, unsurprisingly perched on a hilltop overlooking a lush, green carpet of wet grass, is a rather spartan, modern looking structure. I find my heart sinking. Surely no clues to my ancestry can rest in a Church which looks younger than me. Yet, the kindly lady inside tells us the Church dates back to the 18th century and was rebuilt in 1782 and again in 1890. According to the 2006 Church Directory, a "mission" of Shiroda was created in 1894 by the Archbishop of Goa and entrusted to the Society of Pilar, spanning from Shiroda to Colem, including Panchwadi, Molem, Dabal and Sanvordem.

"We have records going back to 1860," the lady informs me and promptly places a baptismal book dating back to 1875 into my hands. I am amazed it is this simple. I leaf through the book, a tremendous sense of history, sweeping over me. Some meticulous Jesuit priest had diligently handwritten name after name of baptised Goans, noting parentage after parentage. The writing, so typical of the era was long, flowing, stylized and almost illegible. Somewhere in these books, locked away in the steel Godrej cupboard, standing in the corner of the room darkened by the overcast sky and brooding devotion, was the name of my great-grandfather. A link to my past, leading to his father and mother. I vowed to come back and look for it.

As I left the church, I began to wonder about my fascination with the past. Nothing can explain it, except this feeling that buried alongside these bones of history are clues to my present life.

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