The Red Sari: A Novel

by Javier Moro

  “These Americans don’t understand that every day that goes by means the death of many people!” she said at home in indignation, one day when Sonia had prepared a dish of pasta. “Don’t take this wrong, it’s nothing personal,” she went on to say to Sonia, pushing aside her plate, “but I have decided — and I have just announced this in Parliament—that I am going to stop eating wheat and rice in protest.”

  The session in Parliament had left her exhausted and she hardly had any dinner. She complained of having a bad migraine. None of the doctor’s prescriptions had managed to get rid of the persistent headaches that she had been suffering for several days. India’s problems were the cause.

  “If the rains don’t come, there’ll be another famine.”

  “I’m going to make a home remedy for you, which my parents taught me as a cure for headaches.”

  Sonia made an infusion of camomile and dipped some gauze in it and applied it to her mother-in-law’s forehead. Indira continued talking. She was worried that another drought would show her agrarian policy in a bad light and it was the pillar of her government’s action, which had begun to show such promising signs. “She began to calm down and feel better,” Sonia would remember, not understanding the nuances or details of the huge problems her mother-in-law was facing, but clearly aware of their importance and scope. Suddenly, Indira changed the subject.

  “How are you getting on with your Hindi?” she asked unexpectedly.

  “Badly,” answered Sonia.

  Indira wanted Sonia to learn Hindi at all costs. Apart from political reasons, because the Nehrus had always been accused of being too “British” or “Western”, Indira thought it would be a genuinely good thing if her daughter-in-law could express herself in the language of the people because it would open up contacts to her and also the gateway to deepest India. Was language not the soul of a culture? But Sonia did not understand why she had to learn it, as English was what their friends and guests always used. They had given her a private teacher who had been determined to teach her the language from an academic point of view, with lots of grammar.

  “The classes are really boring,” Sonia told her, glad to have succeeded in relieving her pain.

  Indira did not insist, but a few days later she left a note for Usha, her secretary: “It looks as though Sonia’s progress is non-existent. The teacher’s method is not working. The more Hindi conversation you practice with her, the better, please.”

  Certain habits in that house would have been difficult to understand for anyone. For example, they had always spoken Hindi at lunchtime and English at dinnertime in the Nehru household, and every day one of the meals was Indian and the other Western. Sonia did not understand why each person could not eat whatever they wanted and speak the language they wanted. But as she was tractable, she did not dig her heels in. And she was intelligent enough to know that she had to find her place in that family even if she had to bow to demands that she did not really understand. She accepted that that was part of her process of adaptation.

  June seemed to go on forever. It was as if the whole city was looking up at the sky seeking signs of rain. The front page of the newspapers showed the record temperatures in large, black lettering: 46 degrees at India Gate on Rajpath it predicted on 15th when the monsoon should already have arrived. A photo showed groups of children bathing in the public fountains. The burning, parched air dried out your throat. Your eyes stung as though they had grains of sand in them. A layer of grey dust, which the wind had brought from the deserts in Rajasthan, covered the garden at number 1, Safdarjung Road. For Sonia, it was something new to experience how extreme the climate was. In Europe the climate was very regular, and forecasts were used especially to know whether or not there would be snow in the mountains or sun at the beach the following weekend. Here the climate was much more dramatic because of its intensity and its importance for the life of the country, which was eminently agricultural. The failure of the rice crop could mean death for a million peasants. For that reason these crucial days in the life of India were paid so much attention by the people and by the media.

  Finally, at the end of the month, a deafening crash followed by a whirlwind of scorching air, which lifted up clouds of dust and ripped the leaves off the trees, announced the first storms. As though night had suddenly fallen, thick black clouds covered the sky and the dry wind gave way to heavy drops of rain which hammered down on the roof of the house. The domestic staff seemed to revive after so much drowsiness. They went outside and got soaking wet and smiles lit up their faces again. It looked as though the tall palm trees at the roundabout also quivered with emotion. The television showed pictures of the euphoria which was taking over the country. People of different religions and castes leaped and danced together in the streets like children, splashing in the water, taking showers under the gutters from the rooftops. It was like a big party where the monsoon had made the differences between men vanish.

  But the intensity of the heat was followed now by the intensity of the downpours. The water fell with such force that, inside the house, the noise was deafening. The temperature suddenly dropped a few degrees, and a gentle breeze brought a touch of coolness. In the garden, the frogs went croaking across the grass that regained its greenness as though by magic, but two days later the garden was so flooded that it looked like a lake. If many slum areas literally disappeared with the rains only to be rebuilt later, the districts of New Delhi were not immune to the consequences of the downpour. The elegant roundabouts of the embassies’ neighbourhood were flooded, as well as the tunnels, and many vehicles were stuck like dead things, taxis, rickshaws with their engines flooded giving their dying belches unmindful of the efforts of their owners to get them going again. Although the heat became less intense, the feeling of sultriness was unpleasant. Sonia had the impression that her hands were always damp; she changed her clothes several times a day because they were soaked in sweat. She was astonished that it did not stop raining for days, as if the gods of the climate were taking revenge for the burning, dry heat of the previous months. Now she understood why the facades of so many buildings seemed dirty and stained, why there were so many potholes, and the answer was that the climate washed everything away and made any maintenance work too expensive for such a poor country.

  The positive part is that the rains brought the joy outside into the house, as though the happiness of a whole, gigantic country slipped in through the windows and invaded every corner. A country which, by not dying of hunger this year, might perhaps keep going and not face those terrible famines of the past again. Very in touch with the feeling of the people, Indira seemed infected with that joy. In spite of so many other problems, she was a radiant woman once again.

  11

  Perhaps because she did not see Sonia’s shy behaviour as a threat, in a surprisingly short period of time Indira, who was of a rather suspicious nature, came to be really fond of her daughter-in-law. She was a discreet, direct person, two qualities which had won her immediate sympathy. But she was also home-loving and she liked to lead a family-oriented life. She did not push Rajiv to live with her as a couple apart from everyone else, as might have been thought at first. On the contrary, she insisted that they should go on respecting the age-old traditions, such as having meals together, a custom that went back to the times of Teen Murti House. Independently of where each member of the family was, they all tried hard to get home to have their meals together, unless there was some official act or other. Since the time they were children, Rajiv and Sanjay had got used to leaving whatever they were doing in order to have lunch with the rest of the family. Sonia thought this was a very good idea because conversations at table were always very lively, except when Sanjay started talking politics with his mother. The usual thing was an exchange of points of view, jokes and personal experiences. If Rajiv and Sonia were going out at night with their friends, they waited for Indira to finish having dinner and kept her company. Indira had a great talent for conversation; s
he was quick in her observations, clear in her descriptions and she had a sharp sense of humour. Her interests were not limited to politics, but also the arts, advances in science, people’s behaviour, books, nature… There were surprising things within her, which were only revealed with time. For example, she was able to recognize a bird from its song, as in the fifties she had been a member of an ornithological society and had learned a lot about birds. She could also tell many tales about her trips abroad. In Santiago de Chile the wife of a politician greeted her by saying, “Ooh, how slender and delicate you look. I was expecting to see a kind of Golda Meir…” Sonia used to burst out laughing at those stories. Like the one in the Kremlin, after a banquet which Brezhnev and Kosigin gave in her honour, at coffee-time when the Russian custom of separating men and women was observed, to her great surprise, Indira found herself in the men’s group… Or when Indira went to see Gandhi to talk to him about her marriage with Firoz, and, instead of encouraging her to have a family, the old holy man suggested that she and Firoz should become adepts at his ideal of marriage and stay celibate after they were married. Then why get married? Indira had snapped at him, annoyed. Sonia, who laughed easily, was enchanted by all these anecdotes.

  When the Italian girl had understood the basic workings of an Indian home, she began to replace Usha in domestic matters. Feeling useful and being busy was the best weapon against homesickness. “Sonia was an organized type of person and she was strong, although she kept a low profile, but she knew what she wanted,” Indira’s secretary would say. The Italian girl behaved as she really was: affectionate, always wanting to please, turning her back on confrontation, even a little submissive in the face of the tremendous sense of authority coming from her mother-in-law. “I understood that I had to give my mother-in-law some time to get used to the new situation in the family too, although she was not especially possessive about Rajiv. In those days, I was always with her, ready to support her,” she stated in an interview published in the Weekend Telegraph years later.

  In that house with its Indian but also Kashmiri and English customs, Sonia made her contribution in a subtle way. And she did it with a powerful tool, which she handled decisively. Sonia had learned the secrets of Italian cooking from her mother, and soon the Prime Minister’s house was redolent with the aroma of lasagna al forno, with pesto sauce with basil picked fresh from the garden, and even with ossobuco, Milanese style. In those years it was impossible to get hold of cheese in New Delhi, but there was always a friend coming from Europe who would bring her vacuum-packed mozzarella or grated gruyère. There was often some joker who said that instead of Indianizing Sonia, she was Italianizing the family… The joke was repeated inside the house only, because if a comment like that reached the Press, they knew that the opposition would use it viciously. The truth is that in the Gandhi-Nehru home there was room for everything, just like India itself, the melting-pot of cultures and traditions, always ready to take in foreign things and make them its own. If Sonia adapted to the existing culture, she also fought her own, silent battle to leave her mark, pan in hand, in that cosmopolitan household.

  Later, she began to learn to recognize Indira’s tastes and preferences, such as her fondness for flowers, for example, and she always made sure there were splendid bouquets on the tables. They both especially liked the smell of lilies, a balm that invaded every corner of that house decorated with almost spartan simplicity, but with taste. The curtains were of raw cotton, the carpets came from several places in the north; there were tribal objects, paintings by Indian artists, some antiques such as a beautiful screen, and Colonial English-style pieces of furniture. Sonia understood that simplicity and economy were the keys to her mother-in-law’s personality. Indira did not like to throw anything away; quite the opposite, and she kept plastic bags folded up carefully so they could be used again. Sonia learned to pack suitcases the way Indira liked, using the tiniest space, without wasting an inch. If Indira needed anything for the house, Sonia took charge of obtaining it. The sales assistant in The Shoppe in Connaught Place would remember that she saw her come in one day, dressed in leather trousers and with her lovely long hair falling on to her shoulders. She had come to buy a cotton tablecloth as a present for her mother-in-law on her birthday. The only thing that Sonia did not share with Indira was the intricacies of Indian politics, which were of no interest to her and which she made no attempt to understand.

  But in that kitchen which Sonia turned into the nerve centre of the home, where everyone came even if only to ask what surprise she had in store for them to eat, they inevitably talked about everything.

  “The family of the Maharaja of Jaipur have stopped talking to us,” Sanjay came home saying scornfully one day. “The Kotas and Travancores too. Don’t expect them to invite us to any of their parties.”

  In this way Sonia found out that her mother-in-law had abolished the last privileges of the maharajas. Rajiv told her that when their states joined the Indian Union, the maharajas received the constitutional guarantee that they would be able to keep their titles, their jewels and their palaces; that the State would pay them an annual sum in proportion to the size of their kingdoms; and that they would be exempt from paying tax and import duties.

  “But with so many Indians and so many of them poor, my mother and her government think that those privileges are anachronistic and out of place,” he told her. “The fact is that the maharajas are out for her blood. The Maharani of Jaipur, who is the local leader of a party on the Right, has given instructions to her followers to break up one of Mother’s rallies. But she has confronted them. Do you know what she said? ‘Go and ask the maharajas how many wells they dug for the people when they governed their states, how many roads they built, what they did to fight the slavery we suffered under the English!’ The result is that Mother has ended up winning across the board, as usual.”

  Indira had done it because she had had to veer to the left in her policies on seeing that the Americans had left her in the lurch. In order not to go on losing support within her party, she had signed a treaty with the Soviet Union calling for an unconditional end to the American bombing of Vietnam. Furious, Johnson had delayed the shipments of food even more. The poor were dying of hunger, not suspecting that they were the price their country was paying in order to keep its independence against the strongest power in the world which wanted to use them as pawns. The maharajas had not been the only victims of that change of policy. Indira’s programme made the most liberal shudder, the industry bosses, the businessmen, the aristocrats and definitely the elite of the country because she also announced the nationalization of banking and insurance companies. Sonia witnessed the euphoria of the common people at these measures. Shop assistants and civil servants, taxi and rickshaw drivers, the unemployed and those that had never been inside a bank danced in the street outside the house. These were daring, popular measures which brought Indira huge political success because the government was taking 137 away financial resources from the capitalists and giving them to the people. The peasants, the small businessmen and dealers were also happy because they were going to benefit from credit under better conditions in the nationalized banks, and all the parties of the Left stood firmly alongside Indira.

  During the early months of 1969, Sonia began to feel ill. At first she attributed it to food poisoning or some local virus, but the doctor quickly put her right. She was pregnant. The news filled the family with joy. Indira felt very happy and redoubled her care for her daughter-in-law. She was euphoric at the idea of being a grandmother. Children had always been a weakness of hers. Now she left notes like: “Tomorrow is navroz (Parsee New Year), but I’m going away early in the morning. Can I give you a kiss now?” Indira was deeply grateful for the stability that Sonia was bringing into her life. She no longer came back from her exhausting tours or from long sessions in Parliament to the solitude of an empty house, but to a home full of life. And that happiness was increased by this news that, more than any other news, was th
e reason for deep, personal satisfaction in Indira. Her new agricultural policy was beginning to bring results. The grain harvest for the current year was double the usual thanks to the abundant rains of the last monsoons. The greatest production was recorded in the Punjab states, in the north, the land of the Sikhs, a well-organized, hardworking community whose peasants had planted new varieties of dwarf wheat developed by Indian scientists from Mexican stock. The new varieties of rice, cotton and peanuts had also shown spectacular results. The increase in production was so promising that it augured that the endemic shortages could soon become a thing of the past. How happy Indira would be to get the thorn of Lyndon Johnson out of her side…

  However, Sonia did not join in that euphoria. Her happiness was tainted by a new feeling, which she had never experienced before, and which rose up out of the depths of her being. It was a vague, yet intense, atavistic fear. Fear of giving birth so far away from her family, fear of catching a strange illness, a tropical infection, fear that the child might be born with some problem… She once again felt homesickness and even thought about going back to Italy to have the baby, but no, that was impossible because how could she be far away from Rajiv at a moment like that? What would the politicians here say? That Indira’s daughter-in-law did not trust Indian medicine (which was perfectly logical at the time)? That what was good for the people was not good enough for Indira’s bahu? Whether she wanted it or not, politics was interfering in her private life. But Sonia was sufficiently clear-thinking to accept it and to understand that the hormonal changes in her body were upsetting her, and that her state of mind would improve with time.