As I come back from Nepal after five months, I immediately find refuge in Tirthan Valley in Himachal India. In between, reflecting on the aesthetics of travelling.

It was the prayer flags and the vision of some White Monastery. At that time, I knew nothing of its architecture, or its history, culture, the depth… It was the aesthetics, only the aesthetics that fermented my edible mind. My leisurely love for Nepal found its ground, like the soul needs a structure, on a third attempt.

From the Uttarakhandi borders of India-Nepal, from both Dharchula and Lohaghat, I was hauled back with the snooty retort of the border guards ‘No Entry!’ Hold on… It was at the end of the subsidized phase of the COVID pandemic. And I am glad they stopped me at the border. It was the presumed end of the second wave, otherwise, I would not have hopped into the trap of travelling internationally. Little did I know a third wave and the subsequent deviants would be a succulent pleasure for the already-depressed human population in the ensuing future!

How did Nepal make me feel? Was it an aesthetically-paced staged walk on a Himalayan carpet or a reiteration of the bumpy roads retaliating against the sole thought of death? There is one primary feeling in the manifold of peelers. We think a textbook-feeling affects the aesthetics, but all the feelings that have stood strong behind, like the bouncers, climax in that moment of an influx. Even how I felt, as a child. It’s the jutt of feelings we carry to the flow.

Just know that the truth of the moment is fractioned into truths of the moment. And all the truths are equally true, only the primary one stands out as more favoured for this regulated minute of aesthetics.

Thousands of kilometers away from Nepal, sitting by the window of a mountain-village in India, I am writing about the aesthetics of Nepal, and I feel equally imbibed in the aesthetics of India. India is so beautiful! Nepal is so beautiful! Yet so dissimilar, only similar in ecstasy.

If you think there’s beauty in love, know that love doesn’t change with the blueprint of a border. The climatic aesthetics does, the cultural aesthetics does, the seasonal preferential aesthetic does…. But there is the aesthetics of the mind. We move towards pleasure, to the line. We feel happy, we feel true, we feel the sense of belonging to ourselves… I feel happy, I feel true, I feel the sense of belonging to myself…

More than the shapes and curves of the Annapurna Mountain Range of Nepal, I treasure how I was in awe of its retaliating power, how it could play with my emotional planes as the fog, clouds, light, darkness, colours, possibilities dismantled in their own aesthetics, and I, a child, realized my freedom, the same freedom I realized the first day I chose a nomadic travel life.

What I feel regulates me, because that’s how I will make others feel. Over time I realized where the ‘I’ lives. I can only travel for myself.

When a landscape scoops down to a finger-ful of adjectives, and new adjectives can serve nothing more than the purpose of a richer vocabulary, your mind reassures that you are on a path.

For the first two-three weeks in Lalitpur, one of the ancient Buddhist towns in Nepal, sadness crept on me from the mirror, the walls, the floors, and the ever-grasping company of people. Tears would roll down my eyes as I would look down at the apartment I was volunteering in. Lalitpur, the fourth populous city in Kathmandu Valley, is confined within urban binds. But the faded-red cherry on top was the ‘perfection’ of life in a claustrophobic weed-smelling apartment with a claustrophobic host.

The 70-year-old American lady, my host, would greet the morning with a series of negative phrases, directed at her own self, and I would not want to step out of the room on most mornings. More and more volunteers started falling off the sky. Eight volunteers for one lady, who had no chores for them. She just wants the warmth of company to evade loneliness, and I understand that.

But I also understand my purified sadness. The sadness of losing feet off nature (right after Annapurna Base Camp Trek), the perfect American lifestyle, the walls gawking at my heartless mind, and the ‘Oh shit!’ ‘That’s crap!’ testing my mood first thing in the fresh morning.

My heart gaped at me all the time.

Then things changed. No, the woman was still cursing through the course of the day, but I willingly took up the project of painting the walls of the terrace and the pre-progressed roof. The suavity of joy that enveloped the feeling of despair, put me in a constructive much-happier phase/face. Then, something else happened. The time from that moment to the next two months in Lalitpur interestingly is one of the most important bi-periods in my travels. And I had moved out of that suffocating house to a healthy and compatible hostel. That hostel also, on a very fruitful level, contributed to the aesthetics of my being. With a little and significant tweak, my mind aimed for a higher leap.

Do you often reflect on the gaps in between travelling across countries?

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