memory upgrade: abort, retry, fail?

Out of terribly lonely times, apparently, beautiful things are born. Probably not true... but this is how we calculate in our head, assuming fairness and balancing scales in terms of how important things are and things seem. What unfortunately we miss out on is that one song that slowly alters being, a movie, one moment, one stunning photograph.. that maybe we would not have seen.

Does that make sense? See, these are obscure scales... everyone has their own. For instance, I believe that of everyone, the poor writer struggling with an unfriendly society, churning out a masterpiece, is entitled to an easy and true love story that is not fickle. And in my rather strangely wired head, being lonely and walking around streets of an alien city would have been okay, if I had been ‘some kind of productive’, instead of the wastrel that I was. But neither is likely. The struggling writer will loose his nerve, his temper at his wife, and his book contract in quick succession. And I have to carry cold climates of a wasted summer, for some more time.

The summer that I lost all moorings of myself and floated into a space where nothing real existed. The summer, for cliched reasons one must say this, that Netherlands believed it had a chance to win in the World Cup, that streamers were hung opposite my temporary house with footballs stuck on them. And Netherlands lost. I don't even remember if I felt anything or even that I should have.

When I look back, I know that time as when I was most lost, most at the mercy of people especially friends willing to take my soul and grind into the heel of a shoe, just for the sheer laughable ease of it. At a point when random kindness would have felt like love, and it strangely did. Easily chucked words became a lifeline, the unlikeliest of connections showed humanity strangely.. and too briefly.

What was supposed to come of that summer never did happen. It was a comic book story whose and twists and turns I had figured out to the minutest detail. I still have the notes somewhere. The story loses its relevance now, except it was supposed also to be a reminder and tribute to someone whom I met one day.

Adaa.. whose phone number is still on my phone. Each time I cross it, thinking of whether to delete or not, it still slips through and someone more important and relevant like the plumber gets deleted.

Adaa was someone I met while going to a festival of Arab cinema. She pushed a pram with her stuff on it. I always describe her in slightly shocked tones as someone who bought and kept a plastic purse so that she could go swimming to the beach and not leave her stuff on the shore where someone could steal it. I thought of her often on lonely shores after that, when the value of a plastic purse seemed very obvious and not paranoid suddenly.

Her job was to weigh and calculate the exact value of gold in an extremely fancy jewelry store. Ofcourse she triumphantly told me about how she once convinced a man to buy a far more expensive ring than he intended for his fiancée. The reason why she trusted me and decided to walk with me all the way to the venue for the film festival is inexplicable. Maybe because I looked Indian, and at one point she had come to India, and gone directly to a village submerged in darkness for a wedding that she only had surreal memories of.

Adaa in my racy comic book was to become my accomplice, my friend in a global hunt for a notorious but extremely sexy kingpin pirate (of the movie, not the wooden leg kind).

She was the only truly random connection I've ever made. I asked her for directions while she stood on a bridge, and she took me all the way to the festival. We probably became friends at the point when I realised how much I missed just going somewhere with someone. And like all the desperate old men who buy hookers for companionship, I bought her a ticket of 10 euros to see two movies from Morocco. She liked both. I think I liked one, I definitely vaguely remember only one.

The next day we went swimming. I wore my oldest one piece swimsuit that almost slips off. She wore a funky black bikini which in any case came off because she sun bathed nude. She was an Iranian and Russian mix, dark hair and not very white skin, though that could be the mild summer tan of Europe. But she didn't belong, and she didn't care about that. She hated Amsterdam. She knew the trams and the routes like the back of her hand. We went to her house on the first floor of a building, a lane away from mine. That is probably the only other person's house I had been to in Amsterdam in all the time that I had been there.

You could only smoke by leaning outside the window because she didn’t like the smell in the house, even though she was a Marlboro Red smoker. Like a typical Amsterdam house, it was tiny and had basically one large room and a kitchen. There was a sewing machine and piles of pinkish fabric spilling from it. We leaned out of the window and smoked into the street, above a seemingly bustling city that gave me nothing to think or dream about.

After that day, I didn't see her again. I could have called her but didn't. I planned to always. Maybe, I had planned a brilliant recovery of myself before I would do that. I saw her once on the street after that, she was wearing a black pant suit and looked younger and striking. She was walking with a couple and it looked like she had more to say than either of them. Her heels were to die, kill and maim for ..

.. and that was it.

No comic book came of that desperately lonely time. No photograph remains of my diminished self from then. What I lost of myself was actually just a sleight of hand trick. I just moved a bit and a goldfish bowl was between my legs. An uncreased two of hearts was in my hands. A shiny new coin behind my ear...

And she was just a phone number.