I went on Tinder for a week thinking I'll discover modern love

"Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?

The Cheshire Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.

Alice: I don't much care where.

The Cheshire Cat: Then it doesn't much matter which way you go.

Alice: ...So long as I get somewhere.

The Cheshire Cat: Oh, you're sure to do that, if only you walk long enough."

- Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Meanwhile a tree fell on her car. There was a storm, and thunder and doors were banging against each other, and yet, we were swiping left and right on Tinder. Two women in their 30s and so many men on their finger tips. Go left, go right. Take it all out on patriarchy. Reform them, have a discourse with them, dismiss them at will, she said.

Such laughable loves. You matched, you talked, and you walked away in silence. You could choose to give no reasons. This was our revenge on patriarchy, we agreed.

But we also agreed that this world of men and women wasn't as shallow as this New Yorker, aged 29, had once described the dating app - as "Dating Apocalypse".

It was midnight, and through the storm and a fallen tree, we managed to get into the car, and decided to get ice cream and give ourselves a break from this "go left" policy. What were we looking for? I had described myself as a prowler.

She said swiping left empowered her. But then, that was just us. Cynical, sceptical women, who had tried to be in love until love itself seemed like such a burden to carry. We weren't delusional enough to believe in such fantasies of online love.

We fell in love with a million melancholic writers who mourned the betrayals of love with beautiful prose instead.

Before Tinder, we'd read out poems to each other, and dismissed this quest for romance as a completely anti-feminist thing to do. We were real people. We'd not shop for love online. Never, we vowed then.

Until we decided to swipe.

Anonymity was our ally and our alibi. We joined Tinder a week ago. I was looking to understand modern love. She was helping me out with her adventures in what we first described as a supermarket of men, and perishable kinds of love.

And yet, with all this promised anonymity, this world was like fantasia. Winged men, and such ethereal creatures in this enchanted forest that reminded of Shakespeare's setting in the Forest of Arden where women became men, and everything was countered with reason, unreason, and it had its own bit of melancholy in those monologues where they envisioned the end of men and women.

We are always looking for love in the wrong places, I once wrote.

In the golden forest of Arden where time was fleeting carelessly, Jaques, the melancholic ex-courtier said, "I can suck melancholy out of a song, as a weasel sucks eggs. More, I prithee, more."

We compared notes. No angels for us. No coffee lovers for us, and no adventurists for us. There were also those aspiring globetrotters, and those that were looking for meaningful conversations and no hook ups. Who are we kidding? But then, you find what you are looking for. That law dictated our exploration.

This is what globalisation does. It is like a franchise situation for men. Like that McDonald's sign that blazes in a desert in America as you are driving on empty roads in the vast, melancholic American landscape, and then you spot the familiar and you walk in, and order the burger and a drink, and mourn the loss of the individual. But this was the rabbit hole, and we were "Curiouser and curiouser!" and they were all mad here, and so were we.

We were true lovers, we thought. Tinder wasn't our Arden, and yet we wandered in it aimlessly.

I was blamed for not being ethical, and I countered saying by posing as fairies and superheroes, these men weren't being ethical either. They were misleading wanderers like me about their capabilities.

***

I said I was a prowler. I said writers wrote in secret, and yet these disclaimers were lost in this world. They said I had an agenda. I laughed. You believe what you want to believe, and that's where it ends, I said.

Disclaimers have never worked. Not in love, and never in life.

They called me calamitous. They inquired after my hallucinations. I said I saw a unicorn once, and they asked if it was pot. They suspected me. I was even more sceptical.

I matched, unmatched, got tired, got curious, and perhaps for a moment deluded myself into thinking that maybe this was indeed the end of romance. Within the first few hours on Tinder, a man asked me when I swiped my first right why was I posing as a Samurai (the photo of me wearing a Kimono), and I said it was because I couldn't find a Ninja warrior dress, and he said Ninjas are invisible, and they come in the dark, assassinate, and leave no trail behind. This isn't bad, I told my friend, who had been busy talking about feminism to a man.

"I certainly don't want to be looked upon as a sex object," she said.

"But we can't reform men. That's too ambitious," I said.

Meanwhile, the man was asking if Ninjas drank alcohol.

"You're four kilometres away. This godforsaken app says," he wrote.

"I'm here for a story," I typed.

"I'm also looking for a story. I, however, want alcohol, movies and mature fun in it," he wrote back.

We, women, tend to think we can turn the tables.

I quoted Mark Twain to him.

"If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much."

He said, "The cat just stays quiet all day and does not give a damn."

This was situational.

He said he liked Ninjas who cut with sarcasm, and kiss with their lips, and not swords.

I said I liked ninjas who mind-f**ked people.

A willing gallant man, as he referred to himself, said he wasn't winning this game. And then he said time was the only an irreplaceable resource, and I said time was an illusion, and a unit of the matrix. We went around in circles of existentialism until he said writers are programming people, and said I was talking like a laptop.

"You remind me of Loki, the god of mischief," he said.

And then, we went back to swiping left and right.

That's Tinder. You go looking to avenge yourself on mankind, and it finds the right match - a man who says you talk like a laptop.

***

"All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages."

- William Shakespeare

I didn't mind nonsense. We were from those times when love happened with letters and flowers and cards, and in real time. This was like a space odyssey. Distance and time, I realised, had become one here. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient. Reality is such a collateral damage in our lives, I said to my friend.

She looked at nothing in particular, lit a cigarette, and said that we were such delusional women all along.

"It's not so bad," she said.

The previous night, she had called to say that she was outraged at the depravity of the society, and had been a benign feminist once, but Tinder was turning her into a "feminazi" and she was beginning to hate men.

She took a long drag of her cigarette, and said that she was here to stay, maybe meet a few of these men, and re-install her belief in mankind.

"I wish we joined this sooner," she said.

"At least, we are laughing," I said.

***

"Thou seest we are not all alone unhappy:

This wide and universal theatre

Presents more woeful pageants than the scene wherein we play in."

- William Shakespeare

There is the paradox of zero and of infinity, which could be sets of zeros set in motion by the multiplying matches. It is also a philosophical space where you review your infinite love for yourself, and get an ego boost.

Someone once asked me why people are unhappy. Maybe they are very lonely, I said, and perhaps I was correct unless you began to love that isolation of insulation, and it is addictive. There are evenings were you play Miles Davis and Bob Dylan, and read poems, and reconcile with the world, and in learning to live with yourself, you chase melancholy forever.

I loved my days of melancholy of creating museums of innocence and betrayals, of writing endless notes to self and others, and compiling them for when I would be brave enough to admit to myself that I was the ultimate betrayer. Tom Drury, a writer who wrote a beautiful book called The Driftless Area, says "I really like people. But I don't know how it will end."

For a writer, they mostly end up in stories. We rummage through our lives, and encounters for stories. We damage ourselves. We do everything for the sake of that story that we hope will redeem us, tell us who we are.

I was always in the driftless area. Bleak, and timeless. But there had to be a way out. I was way too remote. And yet, when someone asked me if I would watch a film with him, I said no, and then I went back to the archives of my notes to re-read a note once marked to self and to a lover.

"Cinema halls are like a time warp. There are glowing eyes in the dark. My editor said yesterday he always felt someone was sitting under his seat. And in his novel he says he could hide his child there because nobody could find him. I liked cinema halls because it suspended time. You could be there and sleep, or get away. An escapist's ways are different. They can't deal with reality. If love or the idea of it wasn't around, it would all be so unbearable. It is better to look away from the world. Because it might just hit you in the face.

All of us are damaged. If it wouldn't be for the damage, we'd be so forlorn. For me, who always seeks it, it is beautiful. I have my grandfather's broken cups and plates and dishes. It seems like memory made them. Beyond the jokes and the lightness of being, I remain a loner."

But we revise what we write. Loners could be wanderers. Tinder was a wonderland. I was Alice always. The question was why not. And since curiosity is also an act of insubordination, that sweetness of rebelliousness can make you finally open up to the idea of being wooed.

These strange attractors were helping me learn things about myself. I met a couple of men. They were sweet, loving coffee lovers. I met them at my favorite café. We spoke about Tinder, and we laughed at the bizarre.

We have all been there before, we agreed. And it wasn't the end of romance. Since sex is so available anyway, and I am not judging anymore, I feel it is what is beyond that is what sets the tone of romance. It isn't extinct.

As Orlando sang in Rajat Kapoor's adaptation of Shakespeare's As you Like it "Rosalind, I found you on Tinder."

***

Be free, wherever you are. That's the sign I read at a cafe with green chairs, and a lot of books. And they serve the best carrot cake. A little warmed up, it tastes divine. I think I grew up on a staple diet of dark Russian literature growing up in a strange place where unhappiness infected me at a young age. Like my mad uncle who was a brilliant doctor, or my cousin who was beautiful but had a hole in her heart. She died young. In any case, for a child to be spending days in a house of despair was cutting her off from the world.

My former editor says darkness is beautiful because as children we played dark room. We go where nobody else goes as writers in hope or in despair.

He said we all live in our bubbles. Real life is strange, and there is always this bubble of moors, and rains, and grey skies, and rains, and a despairing man, and a sad woman.

All human endeavour is to escape boredom. That's how I see it. I am always around. Online, or otherwise.

That's the end note.

And if at all Orlando was here, wandering like me, I'd tell him: "If I could, I'd take you to Havana with me, and take you to its museums, and buy flowers for Fidel Castro, and sit in its cafes with the beautiful melancholic music that only speaks of love and longing, and escape.

"I'd take you to New York and its underground life... and hang with the old men from the Bronx who speak of hard times and an unjust world, or stay in one of those red sandstone buildings with a little fireplace and when it snows, go out for a walk and rush inside a cafe and watch it from the window - the little snowflakes.

"Or just walk the streets of this Gotham City in the night looking for the sky. Like when I was in Bhutan, there were mountains around us, and you could see a patch of black mountain with snow, and that is where I would go with you, or return to the sleepy village in Ladakh where I once spent a night suspended in darkness, and thought of ghosts and witches, and of mountain tales."

"Because those who live in the dark spaces know what it means to find beauty. That's how it is. You always find what you are looking for," my friend said.

"Why are we so averse to love," I asked.

"We aren't anymore," she smiled. "We shouldn't be."

And because all my life, I felt like I was going down the rabbit hole, and because I spoke of unicorns to a man on Tinder who I had met once in a party many years ago in the city, I remembered that exchange between the unicorn and Alice in that bible of a book by Lewis Carroll.

"Do you know, I always thought unicorns were fabulous monsters, too! I never saw one alive before," Alice said.

"Well, now that we have seen each other," said the unicorn, "if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you. Is that a bargain?"

They told me sweet stories. One solemn, of how he wrote letters from a remote outpost to a woman he wanted to woo. One sent me a poem he wrote about finding happiness. One offered to cook me dinner. We met for coffee, walked in the streets, ate ice cream.

Of course, there were those that were looking for mindless sex, or hook ups and there is nothing wrong in that. It is up to us to choose, and that's what it is about. We had crossed the barriers that stopped us from trusting again.

Time is punctured into hole like the moon where I had once imagined a trapped dear looking rather sad.

Craters, they told me later.

But optical illusions are a thing.

Illusion is a word that dictates my nights and days but then, I must cross the bridge to look for an ending.

But then I switch off the lights on most nights.

Some stories remain incomplete. Better that way.

Are any stories complete?

Did Alice grow up?

Did she become an old, unloved woman dying each night a bit because she once went down the rabbit hole?

And if her memory became fictional, would she ever wonder if the adventures were real? Those are questions and there are no answers.

Stories take a toll on you.

I am a wearied writer who takes notes and never compiles or revises.

Nobody is ever missing in fact. Or everyone is.

That snow, sleet, rain, and that alley where they sold Chinese takeaway food I ate while watching television are just pieces of memory.

Those bleached out white shirts, and those colour blind days of scorching sun and lithe afternoons are again part of the experience of loving and unloving.

Should I wait for another thousand years to complete the cycles so I could write the end note? We must all keep extending ourselves, and if we staggered ahead, there was way out of betrayals.

"Tinder, if nothing, told you the most beautiful thing that there were those that thought you were beautiful," my friend said.

In such times, that's a reassuring thing.

And I smiled. Because sometimes, you just want a little note, and maybe someone who remembers you out of all the million people and sends you a hello. That's reaffirmation.

And a touch, a hello, and a phone call are still what romance is made of. And then, there's coffee and stories.