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.