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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

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