by Javier Moro
They decided to set the date of February 25th for the wedding. Everything very fast, but it was better like that. Indira wanted to avoid her son’s wedding becoming a national affair, as had occurred with her own marriage. She told Sonia and Rajiv how the whole country had been against it as though every single inhabitant of the nation had felt he had the right to an opinion. Thousands of letters and telegrams had flooded into Anand Bhawan, some insulting, the majority hostile, some congratulatory. 108 There was an explanation, and it was that Firoz and Indira had transgressed two deeply- rooted traditions: they had not submitted to a marriage arranged by their families and they were not marrying “within the same faith”. This last had infuriated the orthodox Hindus. And now history was repeating itself. As though the children inherited from their parents not only their physical characteristics and skills but also their conflicts, their contradictions and the situations in their lives.
“Dear Father and Mother,” Sonia wrote. “I am very happy. I am writing you this letter to tell you that Rajiv and I are getting married. We expect you all here for February 25th …” Sonia did not suspect that by the time her letter arrived the announcement of her wedding had already been given out by the worldwide media. A journalist from the La Stampa newspaper in Turin went to visit the family at number 14, Via Bellini. “The parents and sisters are going through an extremely tense time,” he wrote. “The phone does not stop ringing and journalists and photographers are lining up outside the gate. The father, aged 53, is a man of few words: ‘All my life working to get a future for my daughters … as for the wedding, it’s better to talk about it once it’s over, or it would be better not to ever have to talk about it,’ he declared in a tone that allows the listener to glimpse the fact that he is hurt. His wife, Paola, aged 45, cannot hold back her tears. ‘I’m terrified at the idea of my daughter going to live so far away,’ she said. When asked about the groom, they added, ‘He’s a quiet young man, well brought up and serious,’ and to the question whether they would be going to the celebration, the father replied, ‘Only my wife will go, I have too much work and I cannot waste any time. I will be with my daughter in my thoughts.’”
It was going to be a civil wedding, since it could not be a religious one. A simple wedding, not a lavish one, “Indian-style” which would last several days. Indira was against the pomp and wasteful showiness of Indian weddings, done like that to proudly display relationships, power and money. The Nehrus did not need to show off. But they did need space in which to live. The colonial villa which the government had assigned Indira when she was named Prime Minister was too small, so much so that the secretaries and assistants worked under lean-tos in the garden. By giving the new couple a bedroom and a small living room at the back, with an independent way out to the garden, they would be even more squashed together. So Indira was in talks with her cabinet to have the house made bigger. Soon the builders started their work.
The fuss of the preparations suddenly absorbed all the members of the family, especially Sonia. She did not at all like having to exchange her tight trousers for a sari, an item of clothing in which she felt ridiculous. She could not get to feel comfortable because she was always afraid that at any moment the six metres of cloth wrapped around her might fall down. She felt like those tourists with very white skin who paraded around wearing garish saris. Of course for them it was just a game, dressing up for a photo to show when they got back home; for Sonia the sari was much more. It marked the first step in the process of her indianization. Sooner or later, she would have to get used to it.
A mass of details had to be dealt with: drawing up guest lists, designing invitations, trying out hairstyles and makeup, etc. Sonia’s head was spinning, because in addition she did not understand the Indians’ English very well, as they had a strong accent. Deep down she was wishing it would all be over as soon as possible. Her proverbial shyness prevented her from feeling comfortable as the centre of attention, although she could do nothing to prevent it. She was literally besieged by photographers the day she went out with the family as Rajiv’s official fiancée, to attend a Pierre Cardin fashion parade at the Ashok Hotel in New Delhi. A lengthy report dealt with the event in the Femina magazine. Sonia looked very pretty, with her straight hair falling on to her shoulders, covered by a printed silk sari. She sat between Rajiv and Sanjay while she talked to Indira. A photo that suggested perfect family harmony. On their way out, Sonia answered an insidious question from a reporter: “I am going to marry Rajiv the person, not the son of the Prime Minister.” It was inevitable that many people should see her as an opportunist, an ambitious woman who had made a big catch. And that made her feel deeply sad and indignant. When another reporter asked her what she thought about staying to live in India, so far from home, Sonia looked up at Rajiv and giving a shy smile, she said, “With Rajiv I would go to the ends of the earth.”
And was India not actually the ends of the earth in those days? For the Maino family it was, and they hardly had time to get organized. In the end, only Sonia’s mother came, with one of her sisters and her uncle Mario (her mother’s brother), who would act in lieu of her father and give away his young niece. They arrived the day before the wedding when the mehendi ceremony was being celebrated in the garden of the friends where Sonia was staying. This was the equivalent of the bride’s hen party. Although traditionally neither the groom nor his parents should attend, on this occasion an exception was made and both Rajiv and his mother were present because they wanted to greet the members of the family who had come from Italy. Indira was warm and extremely attentive to Paola, who felt intimidated and impatient to see her daughter. She looked all over for her. When they pointed her out, she exclaimed in shock: “Oh mamma mia!”
She almost burst into tears. She had not recognized her because Sonia’s head was covered by a red and purple veil, she was dressed in a full-length red skirt, typical of Kashmir, and an embroidered red bodice. She was wearing bracelets, necklaces and a tiara made out of lily and jasmine petals threaded together—they called it floral jewellery – and on her forehead a tilak, the red dot that symbolizes the third eye which is able to see beyond appearances. Her hands, arms and feet were totally covered in curious tattoos done in henna, a paste extracted from the ground-up branches of a bush, tattoos that drew graceful arabesques and intricate designs. When she had got over her shock at seeing her daughter like this, her mother hugged her. “Thank goodness your father hasn’t seen you dressed up like this!” she said, full of emotion. Poor Stefano, eight thousand kilometres away, was sad. He confessed to Danilo, his best friend, the mechanic, his fear for Sonia: “She’ll be thrown to the tigers!” How right the former shepherd from the Asiago mountains was.
Young girls immediately surrounded the sister and Paola and offered to paint their hands for them. As they applied the henna, they explained the tradition to them: the darker the drawings came out on the bride’s hands, the more love there would be in the marriage. And the longer they took to fade, the longer the passion would last. Paola and the sister looked at the arabesques on Sonia’s hands: they were as black as if they had been drawn in Indian ink.
The wedding proper took place the next day, at six in the evening at number 1, Safdarjung Road. Indira had gone through all her wardrobes for the sari she wanted Sonia to wear, the same one she had worn, the one Nehru had woven during his long hours of imprisonment, once he had accepted his daughter’s decision to marry Firoz. Sonia recognized it as she had seen it at the exhibition in London and she remembered Rajiv’s words: “I hope you will wear it one day!” At the time she had taken it as a joke. She had still dreamed of getting married in white. Now she took it as an honour and a sign of affection, not suspecting for a moment that when she wore that pale red sari she too would become part of the history of India.
One small incident infuriated Rajiv, when he discovered that there were two reporters among the guests. This was his celebration and he did not want any interference or publicity. That day he just
wanted to be Rajiv, not the son of the highest authority in the country, which was really ingenuous of him. He refused to come out of the house until the paparazzi had been expelled. Indira had to calm him down very patiently. When Mendelssohn’s Wedding March announced the arrival of the bride, he quietened down. Rajiv went out to welcome Sonia in the garden where there were some two hundred guests, friends and acquaintances of the family. When he saw her come in, on her uncle Mario’s arm, his face changed. Sonia was resplendent. She was the living picture of elegance with her hair pulled back in a bun held in place by a brooch of jasmine petals. Her skin gleamed from the turmeric mask that had been put on her a few hours before. She had a simple silver bracelet on her wrist, her eyes were painted with kohl and her face was framed by flower earrings. They made a fine couple. He was wearing tight white trousers, a long cream-coloured jacket buttoned up to the neck, a salmon pink turban, and slipper-type shoes, with upward curving tips, like a prince out of the Arabian Nights. After the ritual exchange of garlands, they moved towards a corner of the garden where the closest members of the family were gathered round a table sheltered by a huge screen also made of flowers threaded together on hanging strings. They signed the civil register and exchanged rings. Sonia struggled to control her emotions. Every time her eyes met those of her mother, she felt like crying. So she preferred to look at Rajiv in order to gather her strength. Uncle Mario looked lost; he looked at his niece with affection and indulgence. Paola kept calm, although deep inside that wedding without a priest made her feel infinitely sad. Rajiv’s words as he read some verses from the Rigveda chosen specially by his mother, brought the ceremony to an end:
Sweet blows the wind,
Sweet flow the rivers.
May the nights and days bring us happiness,
may the dust of the earth yield us happiness,
may the trees make us happy with their fruit,
may the Sun endow us with happiness …
And that was all. The young couple came out of the enclosed area to find a shower of rose petals and the noise of fireworks carefully orchestrated by Sanjay. The ceremony could not have been simpler. That is how Indira wanted it, without the fuss of having to kowtow to the orthodox Hindus, who called for a complete religious ceremony. When she got married, Nehru had asked her to agree to do it according to the Hindu rite, walking seven times round the sacred fire and listening to interminable mantras, because he did not want to make enemies out of them. She had agreed, but now she was taking her revenge. Indira was tougher than her father. In fact she had not wept during the ceremony of her own wedding. Nehru had; his eyes had become damp.
9
In the afternoon Sonia had moved all her things from the house where she had been staying to her new home. The building work done had extended the main sitting room, which Indira had furnished in pastel pink tones and moss green; a sliding door gave on to an area with enormous trees and bushes amongst which fluttered birds and butterflies.
After the celebration, she went into her new quarters, a large, comfortable room that had been added at the back of the house and which still smelled of damp plaster. Her mother had brought her clothes from Italy, a few books and records and the newspapers from the plane because she was worried her daughter might feel homesick. Sitting on the bed, Sonia glanced at the headlines. “Wind makes Tower of Pisa shake”, “Lucia Bose asks for custody of her children” and an interview with the first man to live two weeks with a heart transplant, a South African called Blaiberg. To her it seemed like news from another planet. News from a world that was no longer hers. As Rajiv removed his flamboyant turban standing in front of the bathroom mirror and several servants came in and out looking at her out of the corner of their eyes, Sonia felt dizzy to think that there was no going back now. The die had been cast. How had she come this far? She was surprised at the strength she had garnered to get what she wanted. She, who had always been against confrontation, had had to put pressure on her family and she would never have believed herself capable of going to such an extreme. Added to the happiness of having achieved her goal and the joy of feeling Rajiv’s presence so close to her, there was a deep feeling of surprise and also of sorrow. Sorrow for her father. Sorrow at not being able to share the most important time of her life with all those she loved, with her friends from the neighbourhood, with her old teachers, with her classmates… Sorrow at having to say goodbye to her childhood, to her parents, her town and her country. Sorrow for her mother, because Sonia could guess from looking into her eyes at all the things that would torment her, from the “exotic” customs to the fact that she was living like that, in the family home, with her mother-in-law just down the corridor, however much she was Prime Minister. By having forced the situation, the harmony of the Maino family had been destroyed, and Sonia felt she was to blame. But life had put her in that position, and since the moment she had clung to Rajiv’s hand in response to his shy advances, back there in the gardens of the cathedral at Ely, she was consistent with herself. No one was surprised at her state of melancholy because Indian tradition sees the departure of a daughter from her father’s house for the home of her husband’s family as a moment of great anguish. Most Indian brides cry and their friends and relations become very sad. Sonia was not going to cry, but her heart was full of grief, although events were moving ahead too quickly for her to feel sorry for herself.
The next day in the afternoon there was a reception at Hyderabad House, an Anglo-Moghul-style palace which the Nizam of Hyderabad had had built in 1928 as a gift for one of his mistresses, and which now, under the control of the government, was used as a residence for foreign dignitaries. Great media events or press conferences were also organized there. Around a thousand people turned up—family friends, party colleagues, politicians, diplomats, journalists, artists, etc.—all of them presenting the gilt-edged invitation they had received from the Prime Minister’s office and anxious to see the foreign bride close up so they could judge for themselves whether everything they had heard was true, since it was all so inconsistent and so twisted by gossip. Dressed in another magnificent sari, Sonia felt like an animal in the zoo. It seemed to her as though the women were piercing her with their eyes, trying to find out what she was made of. Most of them had travelled abroad and were aware of how different India was from Europe. Some of them looked at her with pity, others with envy, yet others with genuine sympathy. The time came for dinner, served on the floor, Kashmir-style. To the sound of a small orchestra of classical Indian music, the guests enjoyed succulent typical dishes with the aroma of cinnamon, cardamom, saffron and cloves: lamb with turnips, chicken with spinach, fish with lotus root… There were also potatoes in yoghurt sauce or fried soft cheese for the vegetarians. The members of Sonia’s family were able to have Italian food, and Rajiv’s uncles and aunts, Parsee food. The delicious green tea from Kashmir, Kavha, was served at the end. But it was not an ostentatious reception. “The budget was small,” Usha, Indira’s secretary, would confess.
Neither was there the money or time for a proper honeymoon. But Rajiv wanted to show Sonia’s relations a little of India, so they all went off to Rajasthan, the land of the old feudal lords, the most spectacular region in the sub-continent. It seemed incredible to them that mediaeval villages could exist so close to a city like Delhi, with no light or running water, but dazzlingly beautiful, where all the trades in India rubbed shoulders in the market square: vendors of second-hand clothes, street dentists, peasants squatting next to their vegetable stalls, tailors, blacksmiths, carpenters, jewellers… Goats, cows and camels swarmed among the mounds of essences of all colours—ochre saffron powder, yellow turmeric powder, ground red chilli peppers. On the way to the Ranthambore national park, they saw blots of yellow, red, purple and pink in the fields, which were the turbans of the farmers and shepherds walking in the ochre- coloured dust kicked up by their flocks. Their wives were dressed in the same hues: they wore jewels of old silver and semi-precious stones and looked like princesses ins
tead of peasant women.
Ranthambore was a natural park created in 1955 in a semi-jungle area to ensure the survival of the tiger. An immense fort, which held ruined temples, palaces and cenotaphs imprisoned by the roots of gigantic banyan trees, dominated the park from the top of a promontory. Below, among the hills covered in vegetation and lagoons of silvery waters, you could see deer, antelopes, bears, jackals and wild boar. And if you were lucky, the occasional tiger at dawn. Rajiv liked this place because it brought together two passions of his: his love of animals and his fondness for photography. Besides, he thought that his wife’s family would take away wonderful memories of India because in the jungle you could not see the human misery. Rajiv told them that he and his brother had been brought up surrounded by animals, enjoying a real zoo in the gardens of Teen Murti House. Many of those animals were gifts that heads of state or Indian politicians had made to his grandfather. They had had parrots, doves, squirrels, a crocodile and a panda from the Himalayas called Bhimsa, a present from the state of Assam for his grandfather. They had also had three tiger cubs. Rajiv adored them and one of his big upsets as a child was when his grandfather decided to get rid of one and give it to Marshal Tito.