Dear Susan,

There were people coming at me from every side, more people than I can describe, from every corner of the world. Large Arab men in their smocks and gowns, and teams of Japanese businessmen in suits; men who looked like they'd been left over from the Vietnam War and ear-ringed couples who could have been from anywhere--all of them thronging down this lane of lights and looking into the entrances, into red-lit magic caves, all smoke and noise, to see if they could spot a Chinese princess. There's one area--you wouldn't believe it (or maybe you would: I suppose the place has become quite a legend now)--where they have whole Arabian palaces on a dark lane, furnished with great chandeliered rooms full of divans and men in jallabahs, smoking hubble-bubbles, while girls of every shape and size move among them, from one dream chamber to the next, looking for a touch of magic, a month's salary in a night's adventure.

Anyway, you know all about Bangkok already. And this isn't the kind of thing one would ordinarily be telling a sister. But since Sarah went away--well, you know how it is. Nobody will listen to me, or if they do, they listen in a way that says they're only being kind, or doing their charity work for the day. You're the only one who understands. I tell myself that talking to you is like talking to a better version of myself.

So there I was in the Arabian Nights. It sounds mad, I know, but I felt as if I'd fallen into some other kind of world that was waiting beside me the way a shadow might, like those stories Nana used to read us in the nursery. Remember Alice in her rabbit's hole, ending up on the underside of the world ? Or the little girl who went to sleep and woke up in another place ? I suppose it's what people get when they pop those pills you told me about in the disco, or shoot themselves full of the yaba, or "mad medicine," the taxi-drivers talk about here, but for someone like me--well, it all came as something of a shock.

Plus, of course, I was jet-lagged. Walking and walking through the streets after dark and looking for lunch at 3 a.m. Everything took on a different aspect as if--how can I put it ?--well, as if I wasn't seeing the lights, really: only their reflections in a puddle. Everything blurred and shimmery and reflecting: I'd look at my face in the shop windows and I wouldn't know who it was looking back at me. As if I'd left my self--my regular daily self--in England and now some kind of outline or facsimile was playing me, off the ground and weightless, in a trance.

The noise from the bars, the boys coming up and trying to pull me into their caves. "Here, sir, very good," "Come here, no problem, only looking." I'd turn a corner and end up in a little lane that opened up onto the river: the shining golden pinnacle of a stupa at the other end. And then I'd stumble back, and there were all these signs--Bad Boy, Helicopter, The Alternative--and you could imagine you were in the mind of a magician. Aladdin's Cave, I thought.


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