When Parijita Bastola was 3 years old, her mother fell asleep on the sofa while the two were watching an opera on television in a language neither of them understood.

Bira Tiwari awoke at 2:30 a.m. and found her youngest daughter so entranced by the music that she was in tears.

“She was crying and watching and saying, ‘Oh, Mommy.’ She was telling me the story, and that it was all singing,” Tiwari recalled during an interview in the family’s Millersville home in November. “Parijita was always drawn to music. She just loved it.”

To describe Tiwari’s second daughter as musical is an understatement.

When Parijita was old enough to begin picking out tunes on the piano and guitar, she made up words to accompany the melodies she was composing. If people weren’t around, she would perform for her dog, a Jack Russell terrier mix named 2K (a homonym for the Nepali word meaning “street dog”) and her white cat, Meow. She listened to recordings of favorite singers such as Adele or Beyoncé or Alicia Keys over and over until she had mastered their technique.

“Parijita would rather sing than talk,” Tiwari said. “She would sing while she was doing her homework. She would sing when she was doing the laundry. It gave me goose bumps.”

Last year, the then 17-year-old Severna Park High School senior made history when she became the first Nepalese-American to audition for “The Voice.” She made it as far as the semifinals, winning accolades from judges John Legend, Gwen Stefani, Blake Shelton and Camila Cabello.

Bastola performed in traditional Nepalese clothing and embraced the opportunity to introduce the audience to the culture of the nation where her parents were born, and where her older sister, Priyankana, lives now. She was widely described as a competition front-runner, and many viewers were stunned when Bastola was eliminated by fan vote last December.

Not bad for a young woman who never had a professional voice lesson before appearing on national television.

“When I’m listening to Beyoncé, if I hear her doing something in a certain way, I try to replicate it,” Bastola said.

“Let’s say she swells into a note and makes it feel desperate. I know that if I want to deliver desperation in a song, I would swell into that note.”

Now 18, Bastola is a freshman at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, where she is studying for a bachelor’s degree of music in contemporary writing and production. She balances her classes with a performance schedule that sends her around the country on weekends. Locally, she has performed the national anthem at the home opening games for the Ravens and the Orioles, and she sang at Gov. Wes Moore’s inauguration.

She also schedules plenty of hangout time with pals, including her boyfriend Kique Gomez, a classmate and fellow “Voice” contestant.

The two developed a close friendship during the grueling competition, but didn’t begin dating until after both had been eliminated. (Bastola made the final eight, and Gomez, the final 10.)

“We were seriously inseparable on the show,” she said. “I admired him as a person even before we began going out.”

Bastola has kept in touch with her coach and fellow contestants; Legend follows her on Instagram and occasionally comments on her posts. But while the show may have jump-started her career, it isn’t a wholly faithful mirror of her ambitions.

On “The Voice,” Bastola sang covers of hits by Lady Gaga, Etta James and the Bee Gees, but she sees herself primarily as a singer-songwriter.

She is finishing the work on two original songs that she expects to release soon, to be followed by an album of her own compositions expected to debut in 2024.

“I’ve always had a lot to say,” said Bastola, who has kept journals since she was a little girl. “And any form of writing can be songwriting, because it’s a story. And singing has always been my way of communicating.”

From the time she was tiny, Bastola has possessed an extreme aural sensitivity. An overheard snatch of music while the teen is conversing can be disrupting because she has a hard time concentrating on just one group of sounds. Competing stimuli pull her in different directions simultaneously.

“I have horrible attention deficiency,” she said. “If I’m having a conversation in public and there’s things going on, so many thoughts are crowding my mind that it’s hard to focus. I will have literally 30 thoughts about what I’m hearing or imagining: how the song is going to go, how the piano is going to be — except when I’m singing.

“When I have multiple eyes on me, it feels like I don’t have to think. It’s one of the few instances when my brain shuts off.”

Bastola’s parents have always known their daughter was a natural performer. But as much as they would have liked to develop her talent through private lessons, that wasn’t possible.

Bastola’s father and manager, Pankaj Bastola, emigrated to the U.S. in 1999, temporarily leaving his wife and daughter Priyankana behind in Nepal. Tiwari said he was the eldest son in a political family allied with Nepal’s king. But as the Communist Party of Nepal began to gain strength, Pankaj Bastola read the writing on the wall, realized he was a likely target, and left his homeland.

Two years later, he brought his wife and daughter to his new country. The couple’s youngest child, Parijita, was born in the U.S. in 2005.

In Nepal, the family had been economically comfortable; Tiwari worked as a teacher and enjoyed the services of a cook and maid. In the U.S., the Bastolas started from scratch.

For a time Tiwari worked in a doughnut shop. When the stress of adjusting to a new home in a foreign country became too much, she wept in the restroom. Later, the couple ran a restaurant in Glen Burnie known as “The Treat” where young Parijita would frequently sit down at the piano to entertain customers.

“We knew that if she was going to have musical lessons, she would need a teacher who was really good,” Tiwari said. “But those kind of places were far away and they were expensive. We had the restaurant for 12 years and we were working all the time.”

Besides, their outgoing, bubbly daughter had so many talents that a bright future for her seemed assured.

When she was in high school, Bastola was the kind of teen who would pop into the office of her state delegate unannounced to discuss climate change, Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo movement. For a time, she planned to study international relations in college.

Then came her audition for “The Voice,” in September 2022. The teen’s pure, powerful vocals caused all four judges to turn their chairs and ask her to be part of their teams.

Nothing about that audition surprised Michael Brisentine, who directed Severna Park High School’s vocal ensemble when Parijita was a student.

“Of the 1,000 to 1,500 students who came through the vocal ensemble, there were maybe five or 10 who stood out,” he said.

“And I don’t think any of them would have gotten as far on ‘The Voice’ as Parijita did. Some people sing the notes and attach the words to them. Parijita sings the words and attaches notes to them.”

In addition to being a superior storyteller, Brisentine said that Bastola is one of the rare amateur singers to possess a strong mix of both a chest voice and the higher, lighter head voice, a combination that produces the desired sound without straining the singer’s vocal chords.

“I remember the first time I heard her sing,” Brisentine recalled. “I thought, ‘What? This is truly insane. This person cannot be 15 years old.

“If Parijita doesn’t make it in the music business, I don’t know who can.”