Until I got to know her well, I’d quake in my seat: Sonia on Indira’s temper

Sonia Gandhi’s memoir, Belonging: A Journey of Love, reveals Indira Gandhi’s temper, strict treatment of staff and Congress leaders, personal habits and love for sarees. She also recalls how grandchildren softened the former prime minister’s temperament and brought her happiness

New Delhi: A staffer made to stand in a corner, a party member facing the wall and another ghosted for days. There were different ways Indira Gandhi treated those who instigated her “occasional explosions of temper”, writes Sonia Gandhi about the former prime minister and her mother-in-law.

In her much anticipated memoir, “Belonging: A Journey of Love”, which hit the stands on Tuesday, the Congress leader recalls her first year as a bride in the Gandhi family.

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The 544-page book, published by HarperCollins India, covers the arc of Gandhi’s remarkable life — her childhood in post-war Italy, her marriage into the Nehru-Gandhi family, the assassination of her husband Rajiv Gandhi and her entry into politics.

“What I found most alarming was my mother-in-law’s occasional explosions of temper. They could freeze the staff into numbness. On one occasion a member of the staff who had forgotten to remind her of an important appointment, and not for the first time, was made to stand in a corner of the room while others hurriedly passed by, all feeling rather embarrassed,” she writes.

In another instance, Gandhi says, she noticed a “kurta-dhoti-clad individual standing immobile in the corner, staring at the wall”.

“I was not yet familiar with who was who in the political pantheon, but the fact that he was within our private space signalled that he must have been a Congress Party senior. I was with Amie Aunty for a good half an hour, and when I walked back, the man in white was still stuck to the wall as ordered by my mother-in-law, I learnt later,” she writes.

Amie Crishna was a senior member in Indira Gandhi’s staff.

Gandhi writes that there were instances when Indira refused to deal with “an offending individual and ignored them, leaving them in a state of suspense for days”. She would occasionally “flare up” at mealtimes, when in Parliament there had been “a particularly unpleasant exchange with the opposition”.

On one such occasion, she pushed her thali to the other side of the long dining table in a “fit of anger”.

“Such outbursts would unsettle me, reminding me of my father’s explosions. While I’d feel perturbed and shaken, Rajiv and Sanjay would wait silently for the unpleasant moment to be over.” Rajiv would reassure her, “Don’t let yourself get so scared. She’ll be all right in no time.” “But until I got to know her well, I’d quake in my seat. She normally repented her outburst and, in her own way, communicated her regret to whoever had annoyed her. But if a colleague had betrayed her trust, she didn’t relent; she’d distance herself and not ever deal with that person again,” Gandhi recalls.

Indira would find relief in certain domestic chores, including asking Amie Crishna to bring out boxes of old photographs, which she’d then sort through by date.

“Or she’d take out her saris and with our help arrange them according to their provenance, placing tags on each bundle so that it could be accessed easily. She’d set aside some that she had worn occasionally and were still very wearable and ask us to make separate bundles for various relatives.” Gandhi also documents Indira’s fondness for sarees and her old Kashmiri shawls. The former prime minister would treasure a number of old sarees that had belonged to her mother in the pre-khadi period.

The frequency of Indira’s “tense moments” decreased once she became a grandmother.

“As the children grew up, it was they who’d be sent to get a sense of her ‘mood’. A smile or an innocent question from her grandchildren at once melted her; they helped her to relax and provided much contentedness to her,” Gandhi writes.