The ROM Walking in the Paths of the Gypsies

In the spring of 1990, Roger Moreau left a successful career in international marketing, packed his bags, and went to India. His singular purpose: to unlock one of the world's great unsolved mysteries, the origins and earliest history of the Gypsies.

The Rom, "children of the wind," capture our imaginations as do no other people and, although theories abound about their origins, all that is really known is that they migrated from northern India sometime between the eighth and thirteenth centuries surfacing in Greece in the 1300s. Their tribe or caste, the circumstances of their exodus and their eventual diaspora remain a source of rich speculation to this day.

Armed with insatiable curiosity, a keen sense of humor and three wonderful, highly improbable traveling companions, the author set out to solve this ancient mystery, his journey taking him from Rajasthan province in Northwestern India to Istanbul in Turkey. Immersed in exotic, often mystical surroundings, informed by strange and remarkable encounters along the way, he leads us on the incredible and at times tortuous trek of the people of the kalo rat (dark blood), whose birth, he concludes, took place nearly a thousand years ago in the world's first concentration camp, an Afghan desert aptly named Dasht i Nawar, Desert of the Gypsies. Along the way, his quest, and his recording of it in this book, would change his life.