The stories we carry in our pocket

After much expectation and a little waiting, my new phone has arrived. It's the latest BlackBerry model (Q10), with a fancy physical keyboard and, what probably endears it to me, a perfectly square screen, and a camera that takes square pictures.

What I was not expecting was to find the footprints of the phone's previous owner (it's a refurbished phone). The phone came complete with several streams of messages, a couple of pictures, some web bookmarks, all of which give small details in the life of Tamanna, a 30-something Arab-American girl from southern California, who enjoys food, is very religious, and is trying to find an eligible bachelor who is arab but plans on staying in the States.

The phone is quite new, and was with Tamanna for only one month, and her messages with several of her girl friends lead from the obligatory messages of "new phone, haven't added you yet, who are you?" up to the organisation and finally the celebration of Eid al-Fitr (the end of Ramadan). During that time she exchanges brownies recipes with friends she met at a pool party, she meets a man from Oman (the meeting is arranged by  a friend and the man's mother), she has some trouble at her work as a food critic, and finally manages to organise the trip to another city to celebrate Eid with her mother and friends. The last day she sends greetings to many friends ("Eid Mubarak!"), and finally seems to misplace her phone.

I can imagine a writer finding this phone and filling in the blanks. From the messages he knows that the arranged meeting with the guy did not lead anywhere, and that she eventually quits her job, and she has a court hearing coming up for some reason. What the writer would speculate upon and develop are the inner thoughts of Tamanna, her reasons and her reactions, her dreams and her dreads, that mixed together somehow leave behind the messages we find in the phone. The book ends with the phone being misplaced amidst the chaos of the Eid al-Fitr celebration, going from the Mariott hotel where a big Imam was presiding for the first two prayers, to the place where Farki, Tamanna's BFF, is waiting for her friend to get coffee before going to 3rd prayers. "be there in 3 minutes!" is the last message on the phone...

I have now wiped my new phone clean, Tamanna is gone and so is the material our writer could have used to sketch out a possible life-story. What remain are the bits of arab-american lore that I've discovered (like the use of inshallah in most english messages) and our sincere wishes to Tamanna for a happy and rewarding life.