It was among the most anticipated memoirs of the year. Much has been written about Sonia Gandhi, the Gandhi family and the politics that have come to define their lives. But in her newly released memoir, ‘Belonging’, she turns the lens on several lesser-known aspects of her life, alongside events that have unfolded in the public eye.
While she has spoken about her first meeting with Rajiv Gandhi at a Greek restaurant in Cambridge, her memoir also revisits the apprehensions of those around her about her moving to India and adjusting to a life vastly different from the one she had known, should the two decide to marry.
“He wouldn’t want to be blamed later on for coming between us – so, if after I came of age we still felt the same, he’d allow me to travel to India to see the place for myself, to understand clearly and fully what I was likely to be up against,” she writes, recalling her father, Stefano Maino's words.
“I was about to step into the unknown...but at the same time something deeper and stronger was beckoning me, giving me the courage to face whatever lay ahead,” she writes.
In January 1968, on a cool morning, she finally travelled to New Delhi. She stayed with poet Harivansh Rai Bachchan and his wife, Teji, whom she describes as a mother figure, “ever ready to help, teach, and counsel me”.
She also recalls a conversation with Bachchan, who "would drop a sentence here and another there to caution me: “You must know, Sonia beti (child) that in this country it is not what you are that counts, it is what people think you to be.”
The advice left her perplexed. “This warning invariably left me wondering – does he mean that I can never be myself? I was I, and that’s the way I was; how could I show myself differently?”
Years later, however, she would find herself looking back at his words differently. “I remembered Uncle Bachchan’s words. How right he’s been.”
The memoir also offers glimpses of the friendship between Rajiv Gandhi and Amitabh Bachchan, from a time when the latter was still aspiring to become an actor.
Recalling one of his plans to play a prank on his friend, she writes: “He wrote of his plan to play a prank on his friend Amit, who was then aspiring to become an actor: to welcome him at the airport with marigold garlands and an old broken-down brass band normally hired for weddings. In years to come the friend was to become one of India’s most famous film stars: Amitabh Bachchan.”
Released on Tuesday (November 10), the much-anticipated memoir offers a glimpse into the many chapters of Gandhi's life—from her childhood and family in Italy, to her marriage to former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, her years watching her mother-in-law, Indira Gandhi, lead the country, and her eventual entry into politics.
