by Javier Moro
Nehru did not question Firoz as a militant, but thought he was a poor match for his daughter. Both men were opposites in everything. Firoz was short and squat; a little boastful, he talked very loudly and used swearwords left, right and centre. He was neither refined nor an intellectual. He liked to eat and drink well and he was interested in cars and electrical and mechanical gadgets, passions which Rajiv and Sanjay would inherit. He had been a very poor student, although he liked classical Indian music and flowers, like Indira. But without a university degree or a profession, or the prospect of earning his living, and with a solid reputation as a womanizer, it was logical that the Nehrus should look askance at this nobody who was trying to get into the first family of India.
“You were brought up in Anand Bhawan, surrounded by luxury and servants,” her grandmother told Indira in an attempt to put pressure on her. “Firoz has no fortune, he’s from another background and another religion.”
“We don’t care about religion because neither of us is religious,” Indira answered. “I am austere, like my mother, and even though I have lived in Anand Bhawan, I can be equally happy in a peasant’s hut.”
Sonia said more or less the same to her parents when they talked about how difficult it was to live so far away, in a country that was so different. For Sonia, India was an abstraction. She was not in the least afraid, in spite of all she had heard. If Rajiv had been an Eskimo, she would not have minded following him to the North Pole. “When you are in love,” she wrote, “love gives you great strength. Armed with that strength, nothing can scare you. You only want the person you love. I only wanted Rajiv. I would have gone to the ends of the Earth with him. He was my greatest safety. I could not think about anything or anyone else, just him.”
If Nehru finally gave his consent for Indira’s marriage to Firoz, Indira agreed to her son’s request when he asked her to write to Sonia’s father to get him to allow her to go to India. A year had gone by, the period of time Stefano Maino had imposed, and the young people’s passion showed no sign of cooling. Neither Sonia nor Rajiv was prepared to live without the other; their separation was becoming too painful. Indira understood that they were serious about each other. Actually she would have preferred to follow the traditional line and choose the daughter of a good Kashmiri family to marry her son, according to the tradition, just as her grandfather Motilal had done by choosing Kamala, her mother. Arranged marriages were common, and love marriages were the exception. The first type usually worked better; the divorce rate among these kinds of marriages is surprisingly low because the parents look for candidates for their children in similar social and cultural backgrounds, which really is an advantage when they start living together. The second type were a lottery. Indira had not been lucky. Perhaps Rajiv would, although he had the handicap that his fiancée was a foreigner. In traditional society, foreigners did not even merit a place on the scale, they were considered “casteless”. New Delhi was not deepest India, but even so Indira was perfectly aware of how difficult it could be for a Western girl to adapt to life in this country, although she was prepared to make it as pleasant as possible because she liked the girl.
Indira Gandhi’s letter inviting Sonia to spend a holiday in New Delhi was a worry for Stefano Maino, but he was a man of his word and he had no alternative but to keep his promise. They discussed it at home and as there was no way out, they agreed that Sonia should go to India, but only for one month, and then she would come home finally convinced that she could never live there, thought her parents. Here, she not only had her family, but also a future. She had been working all year in Fieratorino and she had more and more opportunities to earn a living with the languages she had learned. If she did not like Orbassano because it seemed too small and suburban to her, she could always go and live in Turin. Her parents still dreamed that some businessman would meet her at one of those fairs and would end up marrying her. Sonia made as if she was listening carefully to all these suggestions, but her mind was already far away, eight thousand kilometres away.
On January 13th, 1968, exactly thirty-four days after she came of age, Sonia landed at Palam Airport, New Delhi. Her stomach was in knots. Her parents and sisters had gone to see her off at Milan Airport and not even tough old Stefano had been able to hold back the tears.
“If you don’t like it, you come straight back, eh?” he had told her while her mother put even more medicines in her handbag, as though she were going to the jungle.
Sonia did not sleep during the flight. Now that she was alone facing her destiny, a kind of anguish came over her. The excitement of seeing Rajiv became a vague fear. They had been a year without seeing each other. What if he disappoints me? Or I disappoint him? What if he behaves differently in his own surroundings? What if he isn’t the same as I think he is? They were inevitable questions, the normal reaction of someone who has put all their money on one card. Now was the moment to turn the card over.
From the air, the tangle of avenues and roundabouts of New Delhi suggested the star-shaped marble geometric figures that decorated the Moghul palaces. The plane landed in the morning. The climate could not be more different from the cold winter she had left behind. The temperature was delightful, the sky was blue, and as soon as she left the plane her sense of smell was filled by a very characteristic odour, which she would later identify as the smell of India: a mixture of burnt wood and honey, of ash and rotten fruit. And a sound: the cawing of the crows, those ever-present crows, dressed in grey or black, croaking insolently and familiarly from the banisters in the arrivals lounge, from posts and window ledges. Rajiv was waiting for her there. “As soon as I saw him,” Sonia would say, “I was overcome by a deep feeling of relief.” His brother Sanjay was also there and a friend called Amitabh, the son of a couple, the Bachchans, that the Nehrus had known for a long time. The father was a famous Hindi poet and a Member of Parliament and Indira had asked them to put Sonia up for the duration of her stay.
The fears she had felt during the flight suddenly disappeared, as if they had never existed. In fact now she was sure that she had done the right thing by following the dictates of her heart in spite of the difficulties. “I was at his side again and nothing or no one would separate us again,” wrote Sonia, remembering her arrival.
New Delhi was not the India she had imagined, at least the part where she lived, with its wide avenues lined with tall, ever-green trees, many of them in flower. The home of the Bachchans was in Willingdon Crescent, the avenue of the banyans. The English town planners who made New Delhi into a pleasant garden city wanted each avenue to have its own species of tree. Janpath, formerly Queen’s Way, had neems, sacred trees known for their medicinal properties; Akbar Road had tamarinds, and in Safdarjung Road, where Indira Gandhi’s residence was, there was a profusion of flame trees with their shiny green foliage dotted with orange flowers. The small amount of road traffic was composed of cyclists, carts pulled by donkeys or camels, wagons with yellow tops, backfiring motorcycles, old Ambassadors, replicas of the 1956 Morris Oxford III which were made under licence in Bengal, all of them avoiding the cows that wandered freely around in the middle of the road. It was not unusual to come across an oxcart, or even an elephant carrying merchandise, waiting at the traffic lights. It was a quiet city of three million inhabitants, without large department stores or shopping centres, and with a single luxury hotel in the heart of the diplomatic quarter.
Sonia was welcomed with all the warmth that could be expected from an Indian family, although Rajiv could not be with her as much as he would have liked because on 25th January he was going to take the commercial pilot’s exam and he had to carry on accumulating flying hours and studying. But his cousins and friends, and even Indira Gandhi, did their utmost for her stay to be as pleasant as possible. Although she was sleeping at the Bachchan house, she spent a large part of the morning at her fiancé’s home. At that time, the Prime Minister lived with hardly any security measures. She received people every morning at the doors of her home
with just one guard present. Neither did her sons have escorts, except for certain events that were considered to be risky.
Friends and members of the family took turns showing Sonia the city, full of parks, ancient monuments and magnificent buildings that had been put up by the English in 1912 when they decided to change the capital from Calcutta to Delhi. They designed a new city in which they planted thousands of trees. From time immemorial, plants had been the obsession of the rulers of Delhi. Gardens enhanced mausoleums and tombs with the idea that the dead might feel happier and more at peace; others had been conceived as acts of charity for the people, and yet others had been planted by kings for their own use and enjoyment. Rajiv particularly liked to walk around the Lodhi gardens at dusk, with their ponds and lines of gigantic palms that surround the tomb of Mohammed Shah, a beautiful monument of Indo-Moghul style which still conserved the remains of the turquoise tiling and original calligraphy that decorated it. It was a popular place where couples in love could enjoy a moment of peace and quiet and a certain amount of privacy. On his Lambretta scooter, he also took her around imperial New Delhi, and showed her the spectacular views that the British architects had conceived to impress and intimidate the local population. The one Sonia admired from the archway of the Gate of India, where a perpetual flame burns in memory of the Indian soldiers killed in the two world wars, was grandiose. As was the imposing South Block building, a mixture of the Mogul and Neo-Classical styles where, on the other side of the façade adorned with bas-reliefs of lotus flowers and elephants, Indira Gandhi’s office was, and above all the Palace of the Presidency of the Republic, formerly the palace of the British Viceroy, an elegant building of beige and red sandstone crowned with a vast copper dome of exquisite proportions, considered by many as one of the most beautiful buildings of the twentieth century.
And where was the India she had been told about? Sonia asked. The India that her parents were terrified of? The other India? It was not necessary to go far from there. It was enough to follow wide Rajpath Avenue, formerly King’s Way, and get to old Delhi. That was another world. Around the Red Fort, another spectacular monument built by the Emperor Shah Jehan, the same one who erected the Taj Mahal in honour of his wife, swirled a colourful, noisy crowd that seemed to be taking part in a huge carnival of snake charmers, jugglers, fortune-tellers, musicians, sword-swallowers and fakirs who pierced their cheeks with daggers. This was eternal India, the same that took over the alleys around the Great Mosque, with clothing stalls full of brightly coloured cloth, fruit vendors, people selling sweets, torches, shoe polish and batteries, bootblacks, street barbers, dark workshops where children wove carpets and others made precision instruments … An explosion of life, an exotic, riotous chaos that left her drunk with the colours, noises and smells. And everywhere, at the back of a street, at the end of a garden, you could see an old tomb or cenotaph, a Moslem or Hindu monument that went back to the dawn of time, as a reminder of how ancient India is. Nehru had once described his country as “an ancient palimpsest in which layers and layers of thought and reverie have been engraved, without any of them having been able to erase or hide what had previously been written.”
And then the spectacle of poverty, which she saw from her place on the back of the scooter when they drove through certain districts: naked children running around the streets, old people making their bowls clink, people who washed and relieved themselves on the pavements. It reminded Sonia a little of the poor of Lusiana where she was born, back in the fifties when she was a little girl, those naked children in winter, those families going hungry that her mother felt so much for, those cripples in the squares, former soldiers who had returned wounded from the Russian front … But what she had never seen before were deformities like those of some New Delhi lepers who waited for the cars to stop at the traffic lights. In 1968 India had as many lepers as Portugal had inhabitants, enough beggars to populate a country like Holland, eleven million holy men, ten million children under the age of fifteen who were married or widowed. Forty thousand babies were born every day, a fifth of whom died before they reached the age of five. Even so, the figures were better than when independence had come, twenty years before. The improvement in sanitary conditions, although slight, was creating an even bigger problem, as the reproductive age of Indians was growing. As a consequence, the birth explosion was becoming the country’s biggest problem because it was literally “eating up” economic progress. Each year the population of India increased by a figure equal to the entire population of Spain.
For Sonia everything around her was new and strange: the colours, the tastes, the people. “But strangest of all were the eyes of the people, that look of curiosity that followed me everywhere.” Sonia was becoming initiated into the world of India, discovering how curious and inquisitive the inhabitants could be, especially in those days when there were practically no tourists. If a simple foreigner attracted attention, a woman did even more, and if she was pretty and wearing a miniskirt, which was the fashion in Europe, then she immediately became the centre of attention. Or the object of criticism. Sonia had to learn to control her gestures, her movements and her way of dressing, but it was not always easy: “The absolute lack of privacy, the need to control myself and not show my feelings openly was an exasperating experience.” Signs of affection in public were frowned upon, not only in the streets, but also in daily life. She could not kiss Rajiv if there was anyone else present, or even hold his hand without causing a scandal. She was discovering that India was the primmest country in the world, an inheritance from Victorian England. Then there were things that were difficult for an Italian girl: the food for example. Sonia could not get used to the hot spices and felt that they cancelled out the flavour of the food. Or sauces that were so spicy, or the sweet-sour taste of certain dishes. Or the custom of society dinners, where people talked and drank a lot for an interminable time, quickly had dinner and then there was no after-dinner conversation and everyone went home in five minutes.
She did not take long to realize that the eyes that gazed at her so insistently were not doing so just because she was a foreigner, or strange-looking, or a very pretty girl. She was seen as a new member of a family who had lived for years in the public eye. Everything they did or said, or the opposite, what they did not do or say, was scrutinized minutely, analyzed and judged. How can you live like that? she asked herself, overwhelmed.
But, in spite of everything, Sonia could not see herself back in Italy. This was a very different world, and there was a lot more to see and to explore. At Rajiv’s side it was a fascinating journey, in spite of the hidden dangers. Furthermore, she was surrounded by affection from everybody. Sanjay treated her like a sister, half protective and half amused at seeing her adapting. Amitabh and his family too. She felt protected and loved. For both of them, the idea of separating again was simply inconceivable. Why waste more time, why go back to Italy and wait again, even more agony, until they could meet up again here or there? Rajiv could not contemplate going to live in Europe; he was thinking of joining Indian Airlines as soon as he had got his commercial licence. Then they could go and live in a flat. Here in Delhi it was easier; life together was within their reach. Sonia was the one who had to take the step and take a risk because she had to leave her country and her family behind for an indefinite time. She had come to get to know India and its customs, but she did not need to know anything further because before she got on that plane she had really already made the decision to follow her heart. Even if that meant doing something that went against the grain. She did not want even to imagine her father’s face when she told him she was not going back, that she was getting married.
Indira was surprised when she heard that Sonia was prepared to stay and that they wanted to get married soon. They had met exactly three years ago in Cambridge. They had complied with all the deadlines set, they had done everything they had been told to do, and now the moment had come to make the decision. Indira was aware that Sonia’s arrival ha
d caused a minor revolution in New Delhi social spheres, although neither Sonia nor Rajiv had sought that, rather the opposite. Just her presence, because she was the fiancée of who he was and because it was the first time a Nehru was going to marry a foreigner from another continent, had given rise to all kinds of conjecture. Although it was the capital of a country with seven hundred million inhabitants, society was small, conventional, and all the important families knew each other. In their gossiping, most of the comments were full of praise—“How pretty she is!” But others alluded to her lack of “pedigree”—“She’s a nobody”—or worse—“She’s low caste”. Others referred to her way of dressing—“She wants to attract attention”—; others to her mere presence—“What can that boy see in her?”—; others to a feeling of national outrage—“Couldn’t he have found a better girl here?” Without wanting to she had set a large number of pretty girls in high society against her, as well as their mothers, who saw her as a foreigner, and on top of that, an intruder, who was carrying off one of the most eligible bachelors in the country.
“After a week,” Usha Bhagat, Indira’s secretary, would say, “Mrs Gandhi realized that the two of them were very serious about each other and that it would do no good to wait any longer. The fact that they were going out and about in New Delhi encouraged the gossip and the best way to put a stop to it was to let them get married.” But when Rajiv suggested to his mother that they should move to a flat of their own as soon as he had a job, Indira imposed a single condition on him: “One thing is to get married outside your community. But to live apart is totally against the Indian tradition of the joint family. They would call us Westerners, they would accuse us of abandoning all our traditions.” If Rajiv had been European or a Westerner he would probably have disobeyed his mother and gone to live with his wife. But he was Indian, and in India, sons follow the tradition. Especially when an example has to be set. The solution to the conflict she was in came about because Sonia accepted a condition that most Western women would have considered inadmissible. But Sonia needed to adapt to India, it could not be the other way round, and in India marriage is a family affair more than individual, where harmony among its members is valued above individual infatuation. That meant becoming part of the husband’s family. She would have to live in the family home, Indian-style, sharing the same roof as her mother-in-law, her brother-in-law and his family if he got married one day. Everyone at number 1, Safdarjung Road. Sonia agreed because she was blinded by love. Besides, living with the family was not something to scare an Italian girl who had lived all her childhood in a town where the Mainos were a clan. She also convinced herself that by not being on her own she would be more protected and that would allow her to adapt better. She saw the positive side to everything—one of the advantages of love, which acts like a drug.