Volunteering/Painting in the Monsoons of Kathmandu Nepal

Volunteering in Nepal, particularly in Kathmandu, has presented me with a plethora of opportunities in life! Opportunities to learn, and unlearn. It’s a tiny window to space yourself out in an otherwise blocking surrounding.

The pigeons come every day. On the slit of my window, on the boundary wall of the terrace, and more than often, inside the house. I have become more mindful of the sound of them, ever since I started painting the terrace. The most common distinct sound. It’s like there’re round circles in that monotonous sound. A circle of circles. I always loved the movement of their necks. The movement of the colour around the neck.

When I paint, I can be both mindful and unmindful in rows. Sometimes I am too focused on the sounds. It can be a concentrating game to absorb all the sounds you hear in that instant and try to remember them later. It makes me more observant. Ever since I started painting, I have heard airplanes flying by. The airport is so close to the house that the airplanes seem larger-than-life when they run over the air of our house. I have never been on a plane.

Four months back, I crossed the India-Nepal border by land, with a vague idea of two months’ notice. In uneven calculations, twice that time has slid by. And I am still in Nepal. I am back to volunteering at Ama’s place, the same place I volunteered for one and a half months in Kathmandu. Earlier I used to do marketing for her YouTube channel, I still do it, but I have found the roots again. As a volunteer, my preference always jumps between teaching, farming, and painting the walls.

Ama has moved to a new three-storey house in Lalitpur in Kathmandu Valley. A new house has a vast capacity for painting, and I insisted on spending my volunteering hours painting, rather than being in front of the laptop. Volunteering has sacked up a huge chunk of my travelling lifestyle for the last two years. This is also the primary means of my sustainability. And this is how I was able to keep myself going, being broke throughout.

It’s the walls. The paint on the surface. It’s just sticking colours on a piece of wall. But every brush stroke makes the wall new. I look at the terrace again and again, from the high chairs of the kitchen, while I write this, and I feel happiness at how something can be brought to life with a tint of colour, like the light-purple shade on the steel railings! Yesterday our regular pigeons were strolling on a meek wall in their red legs, and just about a minute back, their red legs were on my purple boundaries.

It’s hard for me to live in an apartment. After coming back from Annapurna Base Camp Trek, I had to sit myself down to make myself understand that I would have to be away from nature for a little while. That is part of the deal at the moment. I have got tons of editing to do, and articles to write, and I know that, again, at the moment, I have very little money. But some things are also inherent. I am just not meant to be in an apartment.

So, I took up the painting project, and that morphed my well-being. I am doing everything I love. Colouring the walls, learning photography, filming and editing videos, writing, and working exclusively on something rather serious, in stature and size, but my only contact with nature is the pigeons. And I am going hiking in a few days!

With every stroke of paint, your mind calms down. Sometimes the mind fills up with superfluous thoughts, that really don’t matter, and then I get jerked back to the pigeon sounds. Over time I will be able to focus more. Tomorrow when I paint, I will only listen to the sounds.

More often than ever, we can choose to flatter our regular senses with colours, beauty, and brush pens.

Shall we choose to never stop looking for beauty?

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