Where, I wonder, does the past disappear? Into what secret and inaccessible places are past experiences poured? My second journey to New York was the first I would make on my own. The plan was to meet up with my partner who had gone to America for about six months (we weren't married then, though we lived together) and, during the coming months, to see him whenever possible in between his travels round the States with a film crew. I remember some aspects of the trip quite well - staying at the Algonquin hotel, spending time with friends in Chicago, discussions with a publisher about a book I might write (the book never did get finished). But, stronger by far than the general picture, it's single images that remain in my mind. Images can become symbols - of a mood, a time, a feeling. Sometimes they remain incredibly real. They do not disappear. They do not become part of the past.

After washing and drying my hair and smoking some nervous cigarettes (this was the mid-seventies, and I was still several years from giving up), I put a few final tidying touches to the self-possessed look of the flat, closed my cases and phoned for a taxi. After lugging my cases out onto the landing, I walked back into the flat for a last look round the rooms. Study, sitting room, bedroom, bathroom, kitchen ... I would not see them again for four or five months. My silent goodbyes completed, I walked slowly back onto the landing and double-locked the door behind me.

At the air terminal in town (you could check in there at that time), a woman with a small boy and a lot of luggage was at the head of the queue at the Check-In desk. The assistant smiled as the woman started handing over a dozen fat bags of different sizes and shapes, one a string bag into which the assistant pushed the beach ball which, otherwise, would have represented yet another separate item. My anxiety about my own baggage being overweight started falling away.

 

I checked in my two big cases, picked up my hand luggage (this consisted of a brown carrier bag crammed with shoes, files and books) and proceed to the airport bus for the trip to Heathrow. The airport when we got there was terribly crowded. In such a loud-talking, jostling throng, a single person navigates a lonely path. Moving slowly at first, then with increasing purpose as groups of people coalesced around me and seemed to pull me back, I made my way to the Air India desks. (We always travelled Air India then, they did good deals). A formless crowd of people was ranged in front of the single open Check-In point. Some sitting, some standing, they had the aspect of one very large family, all waiting on the mercies of bureaucracy. Beneath a Ticketing and Reservations sign sat a stewardess with vividly red-painted lips. She wore a sky-blue sari strewn with silver stars. Suppliant before her mysteries, as if she were a sky-priestess, I approached. ‘I have already checked in my cases at the terminal in town. But I don’t have a seat number yet. When I checked in, the flight wasn’t open.’

'See the man at the check-in desk,' the priestess replied with a sharp declension of her neck. I wondered why she did not look at me. Maybe she was haughty, an Indian woman rightly proud of her professional life. Or maybe she had grown up in such intense privacy she now felt compromised at having become so endlessly available to the eyes of others. Wondering, I joined the waiting crowd in front of the check-in desk.

The steward at the desk was slow. I was the only white woman there. All round were Indian men, their women squatting, patient, on the floor beside their baggage. Hoping the fact of my being female might attract the steward and persuade him to attend to me, I then became conscious of my difference of race and began to worry that I might have that Memsahib look and come across as demanding. I modified my stance to look more apologetic. I was the youngest of all the people waiting for attention.

The steward kept his eyes down. He, too, had learned to avoid the concerted stares and perplexity of those who wait. His fingers danced on the keys of his computer as he carried out his rituals, slowly examined pages of aeroplane tickets and labelled cases, despatching them to Bombay, New York or wherever. I waited for the moment when I dared ask my question. The moment delayed as one by one, no particular pattern discernible in the steward's bestowal of favours, the men received attention. Then the priestess in blue approached and exchanged some words with her colleague. I wondered if they might be arranging to take tea together after work. She moved away. I spoke. 'Excuse me, but are you the person to deal with this matter? I checked in my cases before. Now I need a seat number.'

Without a glance in my direction, the steward called out to the lady in blue. 'Can you deal with this? She Just wants a seat number." Moments later, the star-spangled stewardess had processed my details, still without a glance, and I was equipped for my journey through the skies. 'The soul travels on horseback,' a friend of mine used to say, quoting the Afrikaans saying, and I now frequently wonder where my particular horse is stabled, how far he has to travel before starting his journeys. At the terminal bookshop on that occasion, casting my eyes over the paperbacks, I picked up Winter in the Hills by John Wain. According to the blurb on the back, it was a story about a man's search for identity in Wales. I bought the book. It seemed appropriate for a girl from Wales wondering what kind of identity she would find in New York.

The message on the tannoy was insistent: 'Passengers should proceed to the Departure Lounge.' I followed the signs to International Departures, showed my boarding card and went through security. 'Thank you, Miss James,' said the man at passport control, returning my passport like a headmaster on speech day dishing out a prize. Handbag secure on my shoulder, carrier bag in hand, I moved towards the lounge - and walked through into memory. The complete and certified traveller, I walked through to what cannot vanish. For the truth is that, without the next few minutes, nothing would have been preserved of my journey. Nothing would have stayed in my mind. Only because of the next few minutes happening as they did, did the images come into being that would rescue my experience of that particular journey from oblivion.

At the entrance to the departure lounge, three women were standing at a table. At first, they looked like they were part of a group. Two were rearranging their bags. The third, a young Indian woman, looked poised and alert as she stood beside them, like a maid waiting upon instructions. As I paused, pushing my passport down into my handbag, the young Indian woman turned towards me and began to look at me with a steady gaze. From her eyes and demeanour, I could see she was assessing me, weighing me up. I knew that suddenly I was doing the same. 'We are so different,' I was thinking, 'she in her sari, me in my denim skirt, both of us travelling, she so poised, so calm, me quite nervous about the journey.' Lips pursed, expression set, she continued looking towards me, her face unreadable except that, as she started moving towards me, anxiety washed across her features like the ripple on a pond after the stone you've thrown has started settling into the depths.

She moved, hesitated, then moved towards me again. I saw that, at each moment of her movement, she might stop and change her mind.

'You going Canada?' Her question was peremptory, almost a challenge. Her voice was high-pitched and tense.

'No.' I replied, my eyebrows rising ever so slightly and a hint of amusement perhaps in my eyes at the oddness other question. 'I'm going to New York,' I continued aloud, inwardly appending 'if God is willing' and also adding the thought that, if you're going by plane, you can't just go to a country. You've got to go to a city, a place.

'Where must I go if I go Canada?'

Sometimes, suddenly, the spirit momentarily lurches and everything looks different, as perhaps at a marriage when the vows are exchanged and the onlooker has a vivid glimpse of something in the future, or when a wood-dove coos from outside the bedroom window and the listener thinks of a faraway home. Or as when a leopard leaps in its cage, clawing at a possible freedom.

'Oh my dear,' my heart started saying, the balance of things suddenly utterly changed, plans momentarily shaken, the future revealed as vulnerable stuff, and a kind of relationship instantly forged across cultures, continents and time.

Her eyes were proud as they beseeched me for help. Her mouth was starting to quiver. 'Come,' I said, 'I will show you. We'll look at the departures board.' Reaching out my hand, I looked back towards her as I started walking into the lounge. 'Come,' I said, 'I will help you.'

As she followed, hesitating, I asked her: 'Do you know your flight number?' She listened intently, then held out her ticket. It was in a little card folder of the type which airlines and travel agents give you. All urgency now, I turned over the folder in her hand as she walked beside me. The flight number was written in ink, bold and clear on the back.

Quickly I looked up at the Departures Board. Perhaps she had been waiting too long at that table. The urgencies of air travel sped my eyes down the list. There it was, the flight number, destination Toronto. The Departures Board said the plane was boarding. Gate Number 6. The red light insistently flashed, back and fore, back and fore.

'It's Gate Number 6 you want,' 1 told her. Her eyes again beseeched my help. 'Look there,' I spoke slowly, pointing. 'See those doors? Go through the doors. Then turn left and go to Gate 6.' I counted out the numbers on my fingers. 'One, two, three...' She nodded: 'Gate 6.' 'Yes,' I said, 'Gate 6.' 'Then I will go on plane?' 'Yes,' I said as I felt her hand touch mine, and for a moment we were holding onto each others' fingers, tightly, firmly squeezing. 'Yes - go now.'

As she walked towards the plate-glass doors, she looked back towards me, hand still slightly outstretched. Then we each turned. I had plenty of time. I felt overwhelmed at what I'd Just experienced - the sense of contact with someone or something that would last for a lifetime.

At the cafe, the girl who was serving enquired if I wanted milk with my coffee. 'Yes, please," I answered, probably smiling more brightly than would have been quite normal. 'You have to ask,' the girl explained. 'So many people don't want milk these days.' 'Yes,' I murmured in reply, trying to think of something to say. 'It must be difficult for you. You have to ask.'

The departure lounge, it seems to me now, many journeys later, is the airport with its mind made up. Luggage checked in, detritus of accompanying friends discarded, it is passengers streamlined for take-off to known and unknown destinations. Back then, waiting for my flight to New York to be called, I sat down at an empty table next to a family conversing in German. As I watched the red lights flashing on the departures board, my eyes began filling with tears. Some things remain, they do not vanish. Remembering the experience as I sit here now, my eyes are filling with tears.