First off, Sumit Bhattacharya, who was watched, and his sexuality questioned, on the streets of America.

I was counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike. I had come to look for America. No, I had come to look for my sister's house, in a corner of Maryland. I had come to meet my 3-year-old nephew who almost shares his birthday with me, something the family is quite concerned about. I had come for a Kolkata family reunion halfway across the globe, so ordinary it could be out of Jhumpa Lahiri's everyman fairytale The Namesake. I was an Indian journalist on work in America, going to Washington to meet my parents - who are from Kolkata - in a China Town bus from New York; the driver was Chinese too. I was globalization, I thought wryly.

My parents were at the townhouse -- with a backyard where deer sometimes stop by at night -- babysitting my two nephews, the younger one barely a year old. And my mother was the happiest, closeted in the picture-postcard house with her grandsons, her daughter who had left India nine years ago, her academic husband who keeps so busy even at 75 he is hardly home back in Kolkata, her model National Institutes of Health employee son-in-law. Me, her once difficult son who is married and has been away from home for six years and now lives in Mumbai, was joining in. America was a homecoming, then.

I was in a state of bliss. Mike Stern notes were floating through the August downtown New York air. The jazz-rock guitar artist had been on my list of greats since I heard Man With the Horn, one of Miles Davis's most 'rock' albums in which Stern totally rocked out. He had just released an album called Who Let the Cats Out, and was playing a free concert. Thanks to Village Voice, I was there an hour before time, and in the front row. "What's with you Indian guys and the dinosaurs?" asked an American friend I made, when I said I wanted to see Bob Dylan play. I eventually could not, but that's another story of starvation.

I was taken aback. A woman and her daughter were begging two blocks away from the Empire State Building. "Sir, can you please buy my daughter some food," the woman said, her child beside her. I gave them what I was carrying for dinner. I never give beggars money in India. I am more immune to poverty beside a Mumbai auto than below the skyscrapers of Manhattan. I would watch the homeless and their cardboard boxes, wondering how they would survive the merciless first world winter. I felt their eyes on me every time I passed.

"Can I see some ID please?" asked the man at the beer counter at the Nissan Pavilion in Bristow, Virginia. He must be kidding, I thought, as I handed him my Indian government voter's ID card, which read: 'Age, as on 1.1.2000: 24.'

"Says you were born in 2000," said the beer man. I tried to explain. There was a long line behind me, so he asked: "How old are you?" 31, I replied. "Holy shit, take that and go, man." I walked out, beer in hand, into the Roger Waters Dark Side of the Moon concert. I am not a Pink Floyd fan, though the British band was heavily on my stereo like most children in the turbulent teen-end years. A World Bank employee - older brother of one of my closest friends - had driven me down from Washington and the concert was his treat; the minimum price of the tickets was two days' allowance for me. The evening of songs from another era ended with a giant pig flying off into the red-neck country night, with the words 'Impeach Bush' printed across its derriere.

"So, you work for Microsoft?" asked the man ahead of me in the line outside the 55 Bar, a downtown New York dive famous for its jazz rock. I was there to be blown away by Wayne Krantz, a brilliant new underground jazz-rock guitar player. Playing with him were Keith Carlock, a fantastic drummer who now plays with Sting, and Anthony Jackson, a bass veteran who has played with everyone from Madonna to John McLaughlin. I told the man in the line I was a failed musician masquerading as a journalist. He didn't seem surprised.

Image: A Scooby-Doo balloon makes its way down Broadway during the 80th Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade in New York City
Photograph: Stephen Chernin/Getty Images