The parlour confession.

[By Mayank Austen Soofi]

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 Gurgaon’s Sector 54 in the Greater Delhi Region. “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 favorite virtue or the principal aspect of your personality
Patience

Your favorite qualities in a man
Tolerance, kindness and humour

Your favorite qualities in a woman
Tolerance, kindness and humour

Your chief characteristic
Friendly

What do you appreciate the most in your friends?
Their willingness to tolerate me 🙂

Your main fault
Professional procrastinator

Your favorite occupation
Art, in all forms

Your idea of happiness
Pre-Covid times

Your idea of misery or what would be your greatest misfortune?
Losing the people I love

If not yourself, who would you be?
If not myself, I would not be

Where would you like to live?
The place doesn’t matter, the people around me do

Your favourite colour and flower
Purple, Hibiscus

Your favorite bird
Penguins

Your favorite prose authors
Keeps changing! Listing the last few I read – Jhumpa Lahiri, Margaret Atwood & Rohinton Mistry

Your favorite heroes in fiction
The little prince

Your favorite heroines in fiction
Jo March

Your favorite 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 favorite food and drink
My mother’s prawn curry, Ginger chai on a rainy day (specifically on a rainy day – it just tastes different)

Your favorite 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 reform you admire the most
The abolition of the Sati practice

The natural talent you’d like to be gifted with
Singing

How do you wish to die?
Quietly, in my sleep

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

Your motto in life
Go with the flow