Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Pictures on My Phone 8/15/2013

I bought a refurbished HTC One X (good phone) in the fall of 2013. I tend to buy used phones of 1 generation back, reliving the iterative improvements 6-8 months after the fact.

Whoever had my phone before me -- or whomever they sold it to -- didn't know how to wipe it.

It was full of music -- mostly Bhangra, or what sounded to me like Bhangra. Before I erased it to save space, my car would sometimes just play this music unbidden when it connected to my phone's bluetooth. Which I liked.

It is also full of pictures. Pictures with enough detail to tell me a lot about the phone's previous owner, including a picture of his driver's license. I'm not going to write any of that stuff -- any of the clear markers of who this individual is.

I'm also not going to post the pictures. They aren't my pictures, and it's an accident that they came to me.

But I think I can write about them, in a non-identifying way, with a clear conscience. They are neat, and tell a story, and I'm going to delete them day-by-day as I do.

The first set (the phone's gallery dates the pics) is from 8/15/2013. The last is from 9/9/2013. This already begs a question. Did my former-phone-friend only own this phone for about 3 weeks? If so, why'd he get rid of it so quickly? It's a good phone!

The very first picture is of pictures: a hand holding a wallet with 2 people's photographs, who seem to almost certainly be his parents you can somehow tell even before you've looked at all the others. Two South Asian adults. The man's photograph is on top: a blue background, an unsmiling man with a red dot on his forehead wearing a white collared shirt. He has a slightly jowly face. The woman on the bottom looks perhaps a decade younger than the man, in her 40s. Her photo has a red background and is smaller. She also has a red dot, also unsmiling; she's in a sari with a gold necklace. She has a round face. In the lower left hand corner, just barely, you can see our protagonist's thumb as he holds the wallet open to the oval frame into which these passport photos have been placed. His fingernail is a little bit dirty: there's a crescent of dirt between the pinkness of his flesh and the whiteness where the nail has grown out.

I like imagining that he took this picture to show his parents his phone and its capabilities, although that is also a foolish thing to imagine on my part as there is no reason to suspect that a phone with a pretty good camera would be novel to someone from India, particularly someone from India with the resources to come to the U.S. to study, as we're about to learn our hero almost certainly has.

In the next picture, we meet our hero. He's in a classroom. The shot is a few feet away; the wall behind him is industrial concrete squares, a pattern with gaps between the small blocks of concrete. In the background are other students, sitting in lecture hall seating; a dark bookbag is slung against the tan concrete wall behind a white student in a green shirt. Our hero is South Asian (Indian, we'll later learn). He has on a yellow shirt with vertical grey stripes. He's staring at the camera and at first he looks unsmiling, but that's not right. His mouth is pulled back in what looks like a calm, reasonably content, you're taking a picture of me expression. His hair is short and tidy, parted on the left and combed to the right. He's got a little heft, our guy, though you wouldn't characterize him as chubby or overweight. He's a little meaty.

The next couple pictures are of the campus: a terraced affair with patches of green grass amidst concrete and clean sharp buildings with a lot of glass. There is a centerpiece of some kind, between a couple of buildings, made of black stone. Perhaps a marble fountain or something. Everything is edges and straight lines.

A couple pictures later we get specific: it is a black marble fountain, with water flowing down its several terraces, and atop the insignia of Cleveland State University. Our hero stands in front of this fountain now, in his yellow button-down and blue jeans, posing contrapposto with left hand stuck in left pocked and left leg slightly bent.

This shot is repeated, in various permutations, 8 times. The sun goes behind the clouds and comes out while the pictures are being taken. Who is taking these pictures?

The final pictures of this set are of a performance of some kind in a courtyard outside one of the buildings: glass and edges behind it, marble spheres for sitting on planted on a concrete walkway cutting through the grass -- or rather, because there is so much more concrete than grass, a concrete-ed over (this is nice concrete; when I say "concrete" it has kind of rough connotations but I mean that good slick smooth-looking concrete; the color is reddish or tan or light grey). I don't think I'm profiling just because of who our protagonist is -- I'm pretty sure it's some students doing a Bollywood style dance routine. There are three, a man flanked by women either side. All three are South Asian. The man has coiffed bouffant hair, and is wearing a white suite, red shirt with the collar flapping out over it, and light brown (red?) dress shoes. The women are in loose black shirts and slacks, with magenta scarves tied around their waists. They are clapping their hands as the man seems to sing or shout in the first photo, all three of them lifting up their left foot with the dancing. People around are watching, and a man in the background is taking a photograph with a big camera. The next photo they're doing one of those moves where you lean out all the way to the right and point and step that way with your right foot but throw your hip in the other direction. The next photo: the man is jumping, feet off the ground, still singing or shouting! Then he's jumping again, now to the side, as the women throw their right hands up and their hips to the left, smiling widely.

That's it. 

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