Delhiwale: Ambassador’s room

The lady in white dupatta ascends the hotel staircase to the third floor and enters a corner room.
Accompanied by daughter Indraja and friend Rasa, Diana Mickevičienė is recreating this utterly ordinary act after a gap of 30 years, to commemorate a special part of her past. She had first stepped inside the same room back in 1994, in this understated but elegant hotel at Vishwa Yuvak Kendra in Delhi’s Chanakyapuri. She had then stayed in the city for three months, after which she returned home to her newly liberated republic of Lithuania.
In late 2022, Diana came back to Delhi, this time as Lithuania’s ambassador, and resides in a Vasant Vihar residence.
“Same wardrobe!”—she exclaims in a hushed voice, eyes darting around the room
Diana was 21 when she landed in Delhi one early morning all those decades ago in September. A fresh recruit in her country’s diplomatic corps, she was part of a batch of 25 diplomats—each from a separate nation—-who were sponsored by the Indian government for a Professional Young Diplomats Training course organized by Foreign Service Institute, which is under the Ministry of External Affairs (now known as Sushma Swaraj Institute of Foreign Service). The diplomats were assigned individual rooms in the hotel. Every morning after breakfast in the dining hall downstairs, they would head to Akbar Bhawan on a chartered bus.
That was Diana’s first visit abroad. “On entering this room, I remember I drew open the curtains, and walked into the balcony… the morning sky was dark, but suddenly it was filled with light…. I was surprised. In Europe, the day breaks more slowly.”
Now all these years later, Diana again draws open the curtains, and… there was a balcony back then, she is sure.
Within a few days of their arrival in Delhi, the diplomats were escorted to Sangam cinema, which was screening a rerun of Sholay: “We enjoyed the movie so much that we rented its video cassette from a shop in Yashwant Place, and watched it scores of times, always after our dinner… the TV was in the lobby… I would sing Sholay’s ‘Yeh Dosti’ gaana in my room.”
Curiously, out of all that “magical” stint in our city, Diana gets most sentimental for a short simple flight of staircase linking the hotel’s lobby to the dining hall. “It was the site of many group photos We would often go up those stairs to check if any of our friends were inside the dining hall—we often hang out there… and while we would be in the dining hall, one of us inevitably ran up those stairs crying about the faxes our families had sent from back home…”
Looking about her first room in Delhi, the ambassador murmurs. “So overwhelming.” Graciously responding to a request, she begins to sing her beloved Sholay gaana.