Had the Mughals returned to their native Kabul at the time of Akbar and they would have not met the Portuguese; ultimately, the events underpinning this book would never have come to pass and neither would have the book. Instead, Akbar and his successors chose to make of Hindustan their 'garden', giving the empire an unexpected southern as well as maritime configuration. By the middle of the seventeenth century the Mughal embrace to the Portuguese spanned thousands of kilometres from Sind to Bijapur, with a supplementary eastern arm in faraway Bengal.