Never mind the slick shops, the leather bags and coats, the paperbacks in stacks, the arrogant wines, and cafes where water costs a pound and a half. I have only a five pound note, and in the airport entanglement of faraway bonds pulling and pushing, I want to call home. With a bottle of water I don't need--I have been drinking juices all the way from that morning in Kolkata--I look for a phone. The phones are bright yellow and smooth metal, with instructions printed above them in several languages. I read, and other announcements play from the ceiling, calmly drifting to seats where bored passengers wait and their children climb over and under things, inside bathrooms where lone travellers keep alert eyes on their bags, to smart young couples walking along to boarding gates, to all people in the bright shining flurry of here and there, with little bits of sadness hidden under the potted plants.

Then I slip a coin, and another, and another into the slot, pick up the old fashioned receiver and dial. Ma told me to call, don't worry about calculating the time, she said. Three rings. And there she was, like she had been waiting.

Standing on the balcony, he watches ferns sprouting from cracks in the darkwaterstained house in front. The tiny bathroom window facing him lights up, and he watches to see a distorted figure in the glass, doing nothing exciting, although he can't quite tell. Clouds (just clouds, thank you, not wisps or cottonballs of them) survey the city, and he raises his head to them, frowning at the white light of the sky. He is glad only to stand against the half wall of the balcony with clothes dripping water before him, contemplating nothing, not even there of his own choosing, really, but the house is hot and dull. There is no poetry about him, and no charming thought fluttering in his mind. In fact, he is a cluster of little negations of all things lovely.

He only waits in the mild accents of breeze, and waits for the electricity to return so he can watch NDTV Profit.

Hotel rooms are pastel and quiet so when you pee the sound slips under the bathroom door to the room where the beds with more sheets than necessary and the black TV and the windows that watch a parking lot day and night--they listen, awkward between the childish response of laughing and the grown up one of ignoring. He listens too. Hears, rather, the way he hears you shower when the day begins, whenever it begins for the two young beings you are, the rattle of curtain rings sliding along the rod, the first fierce jet of water shooting at the bathtub floor, the pop of the shampoo bottle flicked open, while he lies in bed with sticky morning eyes.

Then he knows you in beautiful and embarrassing ways, and you can kiss without having brushed your teeth. You can make faces as you hear the moaning ecstasies of somebody in a neighbouring room, their intimacies drifting from wallpaper to wallpaper, softly in the night with the carlights that streak and twirl across the ceiling.

Wherever we go, it's the go-go bars, it's the go-go bars with red lights that fall on whore eyes and teeth and bare waxed arms dangerously, and drunk lovers (or people pretending to be) and a few awkward families stepping their way out of that, that jungle of penis jokes on t-shirts (3 for 45 baht) so look straight ahead (but they all read some and think, haha, must tell the friends) and walk quick, leave the beer gripping pink Europeans and their short skirted girls behind, stepping stepping over a puddle here a stranger's sneaker there, this awful mixed up clamour of tubelights hung on trees and shops under them selling fake things (fake promises that they'll work, too) and the cars glide silently by, below the sky train that flares orange suddenly in the night popped by skyscraper lights, and the wicked signs that say massage and mean sex, like the hotels penning in lovers (or people pretending to be).

We have no use for a purple hat. Not even one with golden strips around it and white net trailing from the back, but it lay so wizardly on the dim night pavement that we turned into enchanted children and picked it up. Now the people in dark coats in front of the pub smoke their cigarettes between shouts to friends across the street, and they look at the hat as we walk through the knotted crowd. It is a bit like possessing a secret thrill, like the evening we found the tower fenced off in a construction compound. It had been thick with gravity, a tower rising from a small castle bewilderingly by a road, crossed by cars with windows rolled up and people heading to the Starbucks some strides away. We had gaped, crossed the road and followed the fence all the way around to a place where we could poke our faces through a gap between two upright concrete slabs and watch the tower closely. A small plastic board said it was a high school's library.

The purple hat is also only a purple hat thrown away, now its conical inside littered with clumps of dirt. But we can't bring ourselves to fling it into a bin with crushed coffee cups and tissues people have blown their noses in. It could have been a magical creature, this one, and for the instant that we grinned stupidly and bent to pick it up from the road, it was. We leave it perched on a mailbox, grand and humble at once on the throne.

From our sunny sidewalk table, over creamy white pasta, we can see a man across the street. He touches the edge of his girlfriend's short skirt and urges it further up her thighs, while she laughs and poses flirtatiously under the palm trees at the street-edge of the beach. We look at each other, not sure whether to be shocked or amused. Smooth convertibles stroll past us, down the row of pastel hotels, lingering to watch girls in oversized sunglasses and shorts that reveal the crunch of the butt.

There is a different Miami too, a Miami with no fuss, swept into the corners of the clubbing, shopping, tanning city. We go there one evening, gliding in a car through the Cuban neighbourhood, Spanish on its stores and restaurants. Boards hang in windows, screaming low prices. We even cross a dollar store that looks like a warehouse, and I wonder what delightfully cheap discoveries dwell in there. There isn't very much delight outside. The houses look gloomy and unpainted, and a mute raggedness clings to the narrow street. Cars speed through the area, all on their way somewhere else.

We stop for dinner at a small Haitian restaurant in a darkly lit neighbourhood, on whose verandah some elderly couples with floppy hats and beach shirts chat. Inside, the room is a blast of colour. Tropical scenes crowd the walls, and tiny chairs and tables are stuffed into the remaining space. A fan groans, turning this way and that in a hot corner. Conversation circles each closed group of diners, and two Hispanic boys hurry about, bringing dishes and punching numbers on a computer screen. Tossing away familiarity, we take bites to explore the innards of fried mysteries.

Next afternoon, we go up and down several parallel streets, but we don't see it. Then, by an ochre house greeted by tall palms waving gently in the heat, the bookstore appears. It is an alternative bookstore my cousin is fond of. A small courtyard divides two halls of books, and we turn right for no particular reason. In a dark wood, carpeted hush, we step from shelf to shelf, from fiction to Jewish history, philosophy to American politics. I read a little here, a little there, flipping over books to read reviews on the back cover. I am tempted to buy, but I don't, hoping to find them in libraries at college. At the far end, in an enclave detached from the room, I hear someone talking in a speaker's voice. I smile to think, a lecture, probably, far from the extravagant gloss of beach parties, chihuahuas in purses and wine on glorious night streets.

Our sweatshirts thin and cold but the air so youthfully profound we hugged our bodies on the stone steps of the library, watching the night pinned to the sky with stars. Quiet spread across the grassy yard and the sleeping squirrels, to the church dark and old whose golden bell rang at intervals nobody understood.

That night we felt powerful, and small. I had decided to drop a concentration in English, and he had decided to drop college for a year. We wanted to abandon our undeserved comfort of brick walls and ivy, of classrooms polite and intellectual, and dash to those places of loss where they needed us. Why had we been granted fifty thousand dollars to argue and essay, when there were exhausted men and women silently bent over in mines and fields, collecting illness and less than a dollar? We knew, while we stretched our legs over several steps, we knew there were people handing over their lifetimes' savings for a chance to live in the first world, our world. Because in theirs, there were machetes and empty wells and homes with flickering lanterns, there were prejudices and worries and landgrabbing. We had class in the morning, English 10a, Major British Writers. But of what importance was it, really, the colour green in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight?

We go to Harvard, some say smartly, pumped with secret delight at the immediate awe they receive. But our pride is a wicked illusion if it springs from the self-indulgent achievement of attending a school. We will only know that we deserved this honour the day we choose to plunge into the wailing world, and leave our resumes behind. Not a day earlier.