The tube, racing through central London. Leicester Square - a beggar steps on. A hard-luck story. He lost his wallet, needs some change to get back home. Perhaps an elaborate fiction, with its own codes; perhaps the truth. The horror of it - I'll never know. But fiction or truth, it doesn't matter - none of that changes the fact of his need.

Faces turned away, eyes averted. Embarrassed silences. People trying to hold on tight to the myth of normality, at the very moment that the horror of this world bursts into vision. Whatever you do, don't allow this to mean anything. It must mean nothing.

And there are also other faces. Stony, disgusted. Contemptuous eyes and wrinkled noses. They want something for nothing, the bastards. They abuse the system. Fuck them. Useless bloody cunts. And they smell too. These faces disappear, as fast as they can, behind the pages of the newspaper they happen to be holding - the Times, the Daily Mail, and yes, even the Guardian are quickly deployed to wrap their faces up in another world, protect their eyes from what is offensive and dirty and scheming and asking them for 50p. Fuck them.

That was there, on the tube. Here, in our own comfortable domestic spaces and social gathering-points, murmurs of the same: 'Real men wouldn't refuse to do a hard day's work.' 'I know them, they lie. I've seen it so many times.' 'All that is OK, but can't they wash?' Some phrases are spoken, some resonate on faces, on the way that the lips are drawn in a thin line of disgust, the eyes narrowed in loathing and, yes, fear.

And here, in the heart of a rich metropolis, a sudden sense of the uncanny, another time and place brushing against the one you inhabit now. I've been here before. The faces and the voices of the Delhi rich - the same expressions, the same tones, the same hatred for the kid on the road, tugging at your shirt, who doesn't even have the decency to be a cripple.

So much for the myth of the Three Worlds.