Vanishing Moments

FOR three decades till Indira Gandhi’s death on the last Wednesday afternoon of October 1984, Usha Bhagat was Mrs G’s secretary, c...

FOR three decades till Indira Gandhi’s death on the last Wednesday afternoon of October 1984, Usha Bhagat was Mrs G’s secretary, confidante, adviser on cultural nuances, saris — her woman Friday. Indiraji, Through My Eyes is a loyal assistant’s memoir.

It is not a biography, as Bhagat emphasises in her introduction — “I was neither interested in writing another biography nor accomplished enough to do so” — but more an indulgence of memories, a re-reading of old letters, and generous nostalgia.

This book, despite the fact that some of what it contains has already appeared in other publications, is still an easy and fairly informative read. It starts in the 1950s, when Bhagat,the trauma of Partition just behind her, began working for Indira Gandhi.

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It speaks of another Delhi, a smaller, more homogenised city where the prime minister and his family were more easily accessible. It speaks of the old India and its elite; indeed it speaks of an India that still had an elite. These days it has Page 3.

Just how tiny was, what used to be called, the Indian middle class is apparent from this paragraph: “My grandfather was a trustee of a woman’s college in Lahore and my aunt also used to teach mathematics there. Once my grandfather invited some professors for tea. I remember three of them quiet vividly, because I met them again in Delhi after 1947.”

The three were: Frieda Bedi, married to a descendant of Guru Nanak and later mother of Kabir; Muga Seth, “a Parsi lady who latter married G Parthasarathy, a journalist and diplomat, the son of Gopalaswamy Ayyangar”; Teji Suri, later to marry Harivansh Rai Bachchan and, still later, to be known as Abhishek Bachchan’s grandmother.

What does this book tell us about Indira Gandhi? Nothing dramatically new, but enough to add to our fund of knowledge. The letters Bhagat reproduces, even if they say little by themselves, indicate a woman growing out of the shadow of “Papu”, maturing into, well, empress of India.

There are anecdotes galore. Pandit Nehru’s birthday parties are described — in case you’re interested, the cake used to be ordered from Standard, above Regal cinema, Connaught Place, New Delhi. The contrasting demeanour of Rajiv and Sanjay is made clear. The younger boy was a brat, the older one polite; why are we not surprised?

In Indira Gandhi’s differences with “Aunty Gauba” — a German lady running a school in Delhi, who once slapped the prime minister’s daughter — Bhagat sees shades of the Indira-Maneka tussle four decades later.

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No pretensions, only honest memories—this is a fine book to dip into a lazy summer’sday; or perhaps even that happy phenomenon vanished with the old Delhi!