NEW DELHI: One fine morning in September 1968, the news of Sonia Gandhi’s pregnancy sent waves of happiness around the Gandhi household. The otherwise stern expressions of Indira Gandhi melted to kiss and hug the to-be mother and exclaim, “One big baby having another baby!”
But it was not to be.
Gandhi gave birth to a boy on January 18, 1969, through normal delivery, two months too soon from her due date. The family was overjoyed but their happiness lasted barely a day.
The famously reserved Gandhi expresses for the first time her grief in her memoir “Belonging: A Journey of Love” that hit the stands on Tuesday. She writes that the baby was buried by her husband Rajiv and brother-in-law Sanjay at their father's farmhouse in Mehrauli.
“I heard the baby's first cry as he was placed in the incubator. Later Rajiv took me to see him, a tiny, perfectly formed boy, with thick, black hair and long, slim fingers. We gazed at him together, Rajiv's arm around my shoulder. We fell in love with him immediately,” Gandhi writes in the intensely personal account published by HarperCollins.
The happiness was short-lived. Rajiv had been told that there were doubts about the child’s survival.
“With Amie Aunty beside him, he broke it gently to me when at 6:30 in the morning the end came. ‘No it was not possible! Why, why,’ I kept asking. Both of us were shocked and heartbroken, we held each other tight. I cried my heart out, and Rajiv, in spite of his ‘stiff upper lip’ upbringing, also wept copiously,” Gandhi writes in the book that hit the stands on Tuesday.
Amie Crishna was part of Indira Gandhi's staff.
Upon hearing the news, Indira, who was out of town, cut short the trip and reached the hospital.
“She embraced us, her eyes red and swollen, and sat with us for a long time. She wanted to remain with us, she said, but had to complete her tour engagement. She left early the next morning, full of sorrow: She, too, had so looked forward to the happy event.”
Soon after, the question of the child’s last rites came up since a newborn, according to Hindu tradition, could not be cremated.
“...a newborn was simply released into the river. He couldn't be buried in any of the cemeteries, neither the Christian one that in any case would have created a furore nor the Parsi cemetery nearby. What were we to do? I listened, exhausted with grief, unable to speak or react,” she writes.
The thought of releasing the child into a river brought back the memory of seeing a swollen male body in the Okhla barrage, “its journey interrupted by a garbage heap. The current had pushed it to the bank, from where hungry scavenging dogs were trying to pull it out”.
“‘No,’ I whispered. ‘No matter what, I'm not going to allow our baby to be thrown into the river.’...’No, I couldn't do that to my baby, no matter how sacred the river was,’ I said, breaking into sobs. How could I consent to do something that seemed to me so alien and heartless to my tiny child, already deprived of his chance to live?”
A decision was reached to bury the child on Feroze Gandhi’s farm in Mehrauli.
“It was a painful and agonising option, but there was no other way. Rajiv came back to the hospital and told me that he and Sanjay had buried the little one deep under a beautiful pink bougainvillea bush, then in full bloom on the left side along the inner boundary wall.
“For a long time we'd pause and place a flower over the spot each time we went there. It didn't assuage our pain, but we had to accept the inevitable,” Gandhi writes.
The days leading up to the tragedy had been uneventful. Indira would instruct her on diet, walks, and exercises.
“Where I would have put my foot down squarely with my own mother, with Rajiv's, I was as yet too timid to resist. I underwent regular check-ups and I had no discomfort except for missing Italian food and a new-found craving for fruits like jamun and phalsa, also for the orange beverage called Fanta of which I'd have twelve glasses a day!” she writes.
The trauma of the loss long affected Gandhi, who felt “depressed, inadequate and guilty”.
As the couple was finding ways to deal with the loss of their first child, a right-wing opposition paper released an article, "Indira Gandhi failed in her attempt to become the grandmother of a bastard child."
“The venom of those words scarred my heart. How could people be so cruel? What had I done to deserve such malice? The hurt caused by that spiteful comment added to the heartbreak of my loss and to my feeling of inadequacy,” Gandhi remembers.
With the passage of time, the “cloud of sorrow began to slowly lift”. In October the same year, Sonia shared the news with Rajiv that she was pregnant again.
“Thrilled but anxious”, she gave birth to Rahul on June 19, 1970.