Delhiwale: Her idea of happiness
My daughter and kids all over who are braving their childhood being taken away from them by this lockdown life
The rain has stopped and the evening sky is looking like an inverted golden bowl. Divya Babu is enjoying this magical sight perched far above the wet earth mired in flooded underpasses and traffic jams—on the balcony of her 30th floor apartment in Gurugram’s Sector 54. “The sky is straight out of a Turner watercolour,” she says (the above photo was clicked by her husband Sanjay Arora last evening).
A watercolour/pencil artist, photographer and “a mother of one”, the high-altitude woman agreed to exploit her balcony me-time by answering the Proust Questionnaire in which folks are nudged to make “Parisian parlour confessions”, all to explore citizens’ distinct experiences.
Your main fault
Professional procrastinator
Your idea of happiness
Pre-Covid times
Your idea of misery or what would be your greatest misfortune?
Losing people I love
Where would you like to live?
The place doesn’t matter, the people around me do
Your favourite colour and flower
Purple, Hibiscus
Your favourite prose authors
Keeps changing! Listing the last few I read —Jhumpa Lahiri, Margaret Atwood and Rohinton Mistry
Your favourite painters
Frida Kahlo
Your heroes/heroines in real life
My daughter and kids all over who are braving their childhood being taken away from them by this lockdown life
What characters in history do you most dislike?
Churchill
Your heroines in World history
All the unnamed women who fought both quietly and vociferously to bring us to the point we are today, where we have the right to make our own choices
Your favourite food and drink
My mother’s prawn curry, ginger chai on a rainy day (specifically on a rainy day—it just tastes different)
Your favourite names
Samairaa, my daughter’s name. It is of Persian origin and means ‘enchanting’
What do you hate the most?
Dishonesty and pompousness
The military event you admire the most
I can’t say I admire the idea of a military event at all!
The natural talent you’d like to be gifted with
Singing
What is your present state of mind?
Scared for the world but thankful to be surrounded by the people I love
Faults for which you have the most tolerance
Ignorance, because it is bliss