Travel is, deep down, an exercise in trust, and sometimes I think it was you who became my life’s most enduring teacher. I had every reason to be wary when, in 1985, I clambered out of the overnight train and stepped out into the October sunshine of Mandalay, blinking amidst the dust and bustle of the “City of Kings.” I wasn’t reassured as you sprang out of the rickety bicycle trishaw in which you’d been sleeping, as you did every night, and I don’t think the signs along the sides of your vehicle — b.sc. (maths) and my life — put my mind very much to rest.

To me it seemed like a bold leap of faith — a shot in the dark — to allow a rough-bearded man in a cap to pedal me away from the broad main boulevards and into the broken backstreets, and then to lead me into the little hut where you shared a tiny room with a tired compatriot. Yes, you gave me a piece of jade as we rode and disarmed me with the essays you’d written and now handed me on how to enjoy your town. But I’d grown up on stories of what happens when you’re in a foreign place and recklessly neglect a mother’s advice to never accept gifts from strangers.

Yet it required trust on your part, too, I realize now, to take in a shabby foreigner in a threadbare jacket, hauling a worn case off the third-class carriage and looking as if he hadn’t washed in days (for the very good reason that he hadn’t). In New York City — where I lived — it was not taxi-drivers who were agents of violence, but their customers. So we both took a chance, in the hope that we could turn an unscripted meeting into something durable. You won me over in your bare room when you started opening up all the albums in which you’d meticulously transcribed the names of every foreigner you’d taken a snapshot of and showed me the handwritten essays in which you shared your dreams (of earning a further certificate in mathematics; of inviting your parents to your graduation; of one day, perhaps, possessing your own trishaw).

When you pulled out from under your sagging cot a sociology textbook from Australia — Life in Modern America — the way someone else might have pulled out a poster of Jennifer Beals, the world I thought I knew began to feel remade. We might not have been friends yet, but you certainly felt like something closer than a stranger.

Days later, inevitably, I had to be on my way, to Thailand and Nepal; a few weeks later, we were on opposite sides of the world again. Within months, however, I was recognizing your handwriting as soon as I pulled out frayed envelopes from within our mailbox in California, quite often sent — for security’s sake — from Bangkok, thanks to some helpful foreigner. You came to recognize my handwriting in return, I’m sure, in registered and untaped envelopes so that your less-than-trusting government would understand that I wasn’t dealing in state secrets.

Mine were addressed to a “trishaw-stand” outside a big city’s central train station; yours to a house high up in the hills of Santa Barbara, home to glamorous blondes and millionaires’ villas in the soap opera transmitted daily across your continent.

Then there was silence, and I started to read about the people’s uprising in your country, and the government’s vicious response. I lived with the evergreen question of how the most blue-skied and unfallen souls I’d met — Norman Lewis writes that taxi drivers in Rangoon used to tip their passengers — could produce and survive such brutal leaders. Was it the trust that had so moved me that left you and your friends so undefended?

I’d never know. But it was no longer safe for you to write, even via Bangkok. So when I described our encounter in my book, I deployed every ruse I knew to shield your identity, even as I was trying to do justice to the very real kindness and integrity of who you seemed to be. I changed your name, but I wanted to honor the details of your life, to highlight Kipling’s famous claim that “[T]here is neither East nor West, border, nor breed, nor birth” when two souls meet, “though they come from the ends of the earth!”

One year later, your government changed the entire country’s name, and the capital’s as well. The party that seemed to promise democracy won an election and was denied victory. Finally, fully fifteen years after our meeting, a letter from another stranger arrived, passing on some news. A traveler had followed the hints in my book, and tracked you down somehow in Mandalay. A different stranger’s letter followed, with a photo. I was reassured that you were still alive; I was also chilled, because if strangers could locate you through my book, so too, perhaps, could the tireless surveillance agents of your government.

We began to correspond again, through a series of passing intermediaries, and then a letter arrived, directly from you, telling me how the extension of trust had played out in your life. A kindly couple from Texas was moved by your story and sweetness as I had been — gave you the two hundred dollars you needed to realize your dream of possessing your own trishaw. A visitor from Italy, a little later, encouraged you to believe you could make good on an even greater dream — to take command of your very own camera.

You had always been a friend of hope, which is how you’d begun to make me one. So you sent the stranger all your savings, and then waited at a street corner at the time he’d mentioned. And waited and waited. Finally, you wrote, you recognized you’d been cheated of everything you owned. You’d been obliged to go back to your village and work for years to support your wife and children. Now, much older, less full of hope, you were back in your trishaw once more, sleeping in the big-city streets yet again, ready to extend trust to fresh strangers tumbling out of the overnight train in the early light. I never know when the next letter from a stranger will arrive.

You, too, I suspect. We don’t even know, not having met for thirty-five years, how much to call one another friends. But you opened yourself up to the point where I feel I know you better than I do many of my lifelong companions. I live in the hope that, for all of my writing about us, I remain a friend, and not the stranger you should never have trusted.

I still write letters to old pals, often, and even in our sixties, we favor the jokes and personae we enjoyed when we were kids. But the letters I write to you — even the ones I don’t write down — never stop evolving, because the decades keep speeding by and circumstances keep changing. Even as, in memory, we’re still just kids in our twenties, on that bright, late-autumn day in 1985, walking towards one another through the dusty sunshine, unsure of how much to trust, and whether it might not be better to remain forever strangers.

Excerpted from Letters to a Stranger: Essays on the Ones Who Haunt Us, out today from Algonquin Press.