A Passage To India

The trip began inauspiciously. From Chennai, he had to take one of
India's overstuffed, clammy buses into the countryside, sharing his
space with too many people, too many chickens and too much luggage.
Halfway through the journey, his eyelids drooping after the long plane
ride from London, he felt a slight tug that woke him momentarily. He
thought nothing of it. But the joy of being reunited with his mother
was tempered when he left the bus – his little purse had been slit open
and the £3,000 of traveller's cheques were gone.

There was worse to come. When he visited the Amex office in
Chennai, the staff refused to reimburse him (which he had understood
was the whole point of taking cheques rather than cash in the first
place). Before they would stump up the replacements, he would have
to provide written confirmation from the local police that the money
was gone. He was also told that Amex did not guarantee to return the
money, but would pay it back 'at their discretion'.

Once back in England, the bureaucrats at Amex were similarly stony-
faced. Renu, they adamantly maintained, had failed to provide the
requisite documentation that would prove the cheques had been stolen
or lost. There would be no payout.

The people he had borrowed money from were friends. But only up
to a point. They sympathised with Renu's plight, but they still wanted
their cash back. The only way that Renu could stump up the money
was by taking out credit cards – this was after all the Age of Plastic,
and the banks and credit companies were as keen for Renu's custom
as they were for anyone else's.

The lousy job at Pizza Hut could not cover his increasing financial
demands: the debt; the drink and drugs; the college costs; the rent.
Renu's world began to wobble. College assignments were the first to
suffer. Having passed the first-year exams at the Harrow campus of
Westminster University, he started turning up to ever fewer classes.
He failed the second-year exams and failed the retakes.

To escape the despair, he started obsessively downloading songs
from Napster, before discovering the sites where members of The Scene
would share the games and programs they had cracked. The nights
became ever longer as Renu sank into the safe and distant world of
the flickering screen, far from the circling dogs of reality.

One evening, he told the tale of his lost Amex money to one of the
many itinerant surfers he met on the Net and his IRC channel. 'Go