Lost In Love |✓

2 | Foreigner.

विदेशी - videshee

alien | foreigner | gringo | stranger | peregrine |

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I was the girl in a crowd.

That girl whose features were indistinguishable from the next, fair skin as fair as any other, hair as brown as it was ordinary, lost in a crowd of so many fairs, so many shades of browns that I just became another shadow of another person whose wit shun brighter, whose looks were better, whose smile was more radiant. Always a shadow.

I was the girl in a crowd.

The girl who blended in a crowd as if I was another variation of blue in a dawn, only to be noticed in the most minuscule of moments, blink and you'll miss it and the wonder that variation could have brought, the earth-bound substance behind that variation that could have made you understand, made you realize: that some variations were opaque but they were gold, would be lost to you.

I was the girl in a crowd.

I held the world at my palm and the color of imagination on my fingertips, my tongue, the world painted so many shades of blossoming silvers and golds that leaked translucent and colored liquid jubilee. My eyes held wonder and my lips stained red, the sound of laughter quick and sharp. I was amusement, I was joy. I painted myself in bolds and neons. I was my own difference, my own sort of unique that polished and shone in the dullest of lights, at the corner of your eye. I was my own variation of blue.

But I was still that girl in the crowd. I was always that girl, even when I wasn't, when didn't want to be. It was never different, a definite constant.

But he was not the boy in a crowd.

Amit Samarro could never be the boy in the crowd. He was too idealistic, too individualistic, to ever be just another person. His difference spilled like a faucet, a stream of openness and fed wanderlust that had always made him too different to be generalized and categorized.

He was not the boy in a crowd. He never was.

Amit Samaroo came to be a resident of small town, America when I was in eight grade, a wondering nomad of seas and continents thrust into a world of mono-culture. The Samaroos were something entirely foreign to the close knit community of Melway, with their skin that was shades darker than their own, earthen tones in a land of pastels.

Their eyes, if the residents looked at them long enough to notice, were of the darkest ravines shrouded by hair like rippling midnight, as long as the universe was wide. They were a spectacle of color and spice and everything exotic. It was a stark contrast to their new neighbors whose skin was either as fair as snow or as tanned as sand. A contrast that never went unnoticed by the residents of Melway.

He was not the boy in a crowd.

He and his family were a mystery, a pocketed source of gossip only to be unleashed when they weren't in earshot in the school hallways or at the aisles of the grocery. One day they weren't here and the next day they were, as if they had decided at the dead of night to pack up their life and thought to reconstruct it in Melway.

They slaughtered a sacred cow in their homeland.

They were exiled.

Criminals, the whole lot of them.

I heard they refused an arranged marriage with a wealthy tycoon and were blacklisted.

The reasons were endless, piled heavy in ignorance and judgement and were never whispered above a few octaves. No one knew where exactly they came from. No one knew why they came. No one knew how long they were staying.

But I hoped they were were staying for a very long time.

He was never the boy in a crowd.

He was a magnet, he attracted, he repelled. Young and clueless, I had watched through ruffled curtains as he unpacked his old life into folds of something new. I had watched through  our shared fence as he grew accustom to his adopted piece of America. I had watched as he created a place for himself, molding himself into our life. I had watched as he grew, made friends, fell in love, fell out of love, became someone different, became someone who was still the same. I watched him leak kindness, throw anger, spill happiness, exhale sadness. I had watched, I had watched, I had watched.

I watched as I fell in love with him, time and time again, and as my heart broke, time and time again.

I was the girl in a crowd. 

It was my constant.

But he was never the boy in a crowd.

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