I sit between the window and a girl from Bombay. She is leaving behind her boyfriend, who lives in England, to resume work for an IT consultancy firm. She talks about IT for a while and I have no idea what she is talking about. Once I hear her using the word "techosolutions." I'm impressed by her open, thoughtful quality, but she seems most sad. As the nose of the plane lifts off the ground, she bemoans long-distance relationships. The lights of London look like a magical emblem. If people in ancient times had seen that road, striped with golden pools of light and threading through the blackness of the earth, they'd have thought it a band of pure god: dreamtime, songlines. The girl from Bombay talks of the global economic slowdown. Incredible that on the train this afternoon, as we pulled out of Hackney Central, I talked to an old Caribbean man about this exact same issue. From the Caribbean to London to India, our world is threaded on this same golden gently-glowing string.

When I flew to India nine years ago (with RobotDan in 1999), I sat next to an ancient Sikh man who refused to eat anything but fruit, babbled in prayer at takeoff and landing, and painstakingly collected every kinked white hair that disattached itself from his beard for storage in the breast pocket of his shirt, as if terrified of losing pieces of himself on the flight. Now I sit next to a well-spoken girl who works for an IT consultancy firm. Is this chance, or have things changed?

In attempting to cut a sort of rubbery vegetarian sausage with my plastic fork, my breakfast tray somehow leaps from my hands and sprays fragments of hash brown over a wide area, including the girl's right shoulder and all of my chest and lap. I spend the next ten minutes carefully picking them out of folds in my clothes and wrapping them in a napkin. Perhaps things have not changed after all; it's just that the girl has become who I was nine years ago, and I have become the lunatic old Sikh.