Who is Aisha, The Girl Whose Life Inspired ‘The Sky Is Pink’?

The more she suffered the more determined she became: Aisha Chaudhary’s mother on her condition.

The Priyanka Chopra, Farhan Akhtar and Zaira Wasim starrer The Sky Is Pink premiered in Toronto recently to glowing reviews. The first trailer for the film released on Tuesday, 10 September, and is getting great buzz on social media. The Sky Is Pink is based on the life of 15-year-old Aisha, who suffered from Severe Combined Immuno-Deficiency from the tender of six months. She lost her life at 15 due to it, just a few hours after her book was released.

Aisha Chaudhary’s story is a special one. Born with Severe Combined Immune Deficiency (SCID), undergoing a bone-marrow transplant as a six month old baby and later being diagnosed with Pulmonary Fibrosis, Aisha’s life had been something of a ‘rollercoaster’, as she would often call it herself. Life had never been fair to this teenage girl, who like many others of her age, had always wished for a happy ending.

Aisha loved writing since she was in middle school at the American Embassy School, New Delhi. I was aware that her English was very good as she had grown up in the UK, but had never really thought that she would write a book. Aisha was bedridden since February 2014 and that’s when I found that she had started thinking a lot about life, death, happiness and pain. Every day she would say very profound things. I suggested that she write these thoughts down and she asked me, “Why? Who will read them?” So, I gave her a book called Notes to Myselfby Hugh Prather and told her that the book had sold a million copies. Aisha smiled and said “I can write better than Hugh Prather!”  

Aisha’s mother to The Quint in an earlier article. 

Even though Aisha would travel across the country to give motivational speeches, she was very sick.

Aisha was using portable oxygen since she was fifteen and although she looked very well in both her talks, she was in fact very sick and the doctors had warned us that if she gets any upper respiratory tract infection, she may not survive. We never focused on the fear and took her all over the country for her talks and she travelled all over the world. We believed that it is better to live a worthy short life than to just survive for a longer time.

Aisha’s mother to The Quint in an earlier article. 

Let’s hope that the filmmakers have done justice to this brave girl’s story.