After two months of volunteering in Mumbai, I had allowed myself to revert to coping solely with my baser needs. You know – food, water, shelter. Other things like feelings or makeup didn’t really fit into the equation. Although for some inexplicable reason, I insisted on applying powder every morning whilst beads of sweat formed on my upper lip. Perhaps I was trying to grasp desperately to what I had once known to be normal.
Once my two months were over, allowing myself to actually feel pretty was a nice change. If you want to see my sweaty and decidedly not pretty self, just watch this video. Natural beauty, I am not.
While I traveled for two weeks in the comfort of air conditioned buses and hotels with hot showers and no cockroaches, I actually enjoyed letting my curly hair go wild in the Indian heat, putting on eyeliner and sticking a bindi to my forehead. These two weeks were not only a reintroduction to Western society (traveling with individuals who had only just arrived in India), but a flash of brightly coloured harem pants, a gurgle of the healing Ganges, a crack of sky-searing sunrise, and all the spicy food I could get my hands on.
Those two weeks are mostly a feeling now. I tried to capture that here, in this video…
(PS – crank your volume up for the second song… I just can’t get enough)
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