New Delhi: In this country it is not what you are that counts, it is what people think you to be, famous Hindi poet Harivansh Rai Bachchan once told Sonia Gandhi while she was staying at the Bachchan home here before her marriage to Rajiv Gandhi.
In her memoir Belonging A Journey of Love, Congress leader Sonia Gandhi details her stay at the Bachchan household after she came to India for the first time to be with Rajiv as both were certain of their feelings despite a considerable time apart.
As she landed in New Delhi at 515 AM on the morning of January 13, 1968, she was picked up by Rajiv, his brother Sanjay and their friend Amitabh Bachchan, who later became a Bollywood superstar.
I was exhausted and dazed but at the sight of him (Rajiv) my fears and fatigue vanished; I was speechless with joy. The airport was a poorly lit hangar sort of building, quite different from the big sleek one in Rome; even the smaller one in Torino was bigger and brighter in comparison. We drove off down a narrow road in pitch darkness to 13, Willingdon Crescent, the home of Amit’s parents. Harivansh Rai Bachchan, a renowned Hindi poet, and his wife, Teji, with whom it had been decided I was going to stay, she says in the book.
Gandhi describes the Bachchans as Indira Gandhi’s family friends from Allahabad.
Tiny Mrs. Bachchan, clad in a jacket and slacks, head covered in a French-style scarf, welcomed me in the porch with the sweetest of smiles and a warm embrace. I felt at once relieved and reassured. She was to become a mother figure, ever ready to help, teach, and counsel me, she says.
I was soon taken to my room on the right side of the house, next to hers, and at last, after a year’s separation, we were alone together, Rajiv and I… He’d remarked on my home a year earlier, its simplicity and brightness, its modern furniture gracefully arranged. And he’d tried to make my new accommodation welcoming and comfortable on the wall behind the bed, a reproduction from his Cambridge digs of a painting from Picasso’s Blue Period; on the bedside table, a vase filled with fragrant roses. A Moroccan embroidered leather pouffe sat on a colourful rug, she says detailing the room.
However, in his attempt to improve the look of the rudimentary bathroom, Rajiv covered part of the floor with a blue-green shaggy rug pulled out of an old trunk in his mother’s home.
It must have been preserved with some pesticide, for no sooner did I step into the bathroom than I found myself gasping — it was the dreaded familiar constriction of breath caused by asthma. Alarmed and dismayed, Rajiv and Mrs. Bachchan helped me with my medication, and took care of me till I felt better. I unpacked and, once rested, I was introduced to the poet, Uncle Bachchan, on his way to his morning walk, she says.
Slightly bent, wrapped in a shawl, bespectacled, and crowned with a crop of thick, wavy hair, he looked to me like a character out of a storybook, Gandhi says sharing her first impressions of the famed Hindi poet.
He, too, greeted me with a kindly smile and a few words of welcome and slowly walked away. After breakfast Rajiv took me to his home. It was freezing cold. I was shown into the drawing room, dim and sunless. A sofa upholstered in dark brown cloth, a matching armchair, a writing desk, a chair by it, and a corner table that was it! I was quietly observing things around me, wondering at the spartan decor, when Rajiv’s mother walked in.
I jumped up and greeted her rather nervously. She returned my greeting calmly and warmly, as if she’d always known me. She was concerned, having been told about my asthma attack, and asked me to be sure to dress warmly, says Gandhi.
While detailing some of the interactions at the Bachchan household, Gandhi says that at the crack of dawn, she would wake up with a start to the crunching of footsteps on the gravel by her window.
Who could it be, so close to my window It was only Uncle Bachchan on his early morning walk around the house. And then, just as I managed to drift back to sleep, I would be reawakened by what sounded like a long, loud moan; it was Uncle Bachchan blowing a conch shell to awaken the gods, followed by the ring of his prayer bell, she recalls.
Though I’d studied English for years, I couldn’t yet speak it fluently, nor could I understand the accents of Indian English. Uncle Bachchan would occasionally teach me a bit of Hindi, but too little to make myself understood.
In his friendly brief chats he 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.’ 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 possibly show myself differently she recalls her thoughts in the book.
So it was that on many occasions, after being dropped back by Rajiv, I’d shed some quiet tears and long for my home and my family. Rajiv tried to reassure me. But in later years I remembered Uncle Bachchan’s words. How right he’d been — a poet and a sensitive man, having himself experienced the fickleness of the public, Gandhi says.
She also described Harivansh Rai Bachchan and his wife Teji as her temporary foster parents who were by her side when she landed in India not knowing what to expect.
