For nearly 2,000 years, Arab traders used the monsoon winds to travel across the sea to India. Along the Western coasts, in Kerala, Karnataka and Goa, they met people who allowed them to marry their daughters, but did not let them take these wives back home. These were matrilineal communities, where the son-in-law lived with the wife in her house. She gave him shelter while he was at the port. He gave her children, who belonged to her, not him.

From India, the Arabs took cotton, sugar and spices to be sold in the Mediterranean. They also took the idea of the placeholder zero, the decimal system, concepts such as infinity and calculus. Indian merchants had invented the remittance system known as Hundi, by which you could deposit money with one banker in one port and collect money from another banker in another port. In the Islamic world, this came to be known as the Hawala system, which enabled merchants to take money across the sea, without fearing pirates. Stories were exchanged too and retold as they were narrated in India: big stories located within bigger stories.