Sonia Gandhi has written about the role Amitabh Bachchan’s family played when she first came to India. In her recently published memoir, Belonging – A Journey of Love, she says the Bachchans hosted her at their Delhi home after she arrived in January 1968, ahead of her marriage to Rajiv Gandhi.
She writes that Rajiv, his brother Sanjay and Amitabh picked her up from Delhi airport. At the Bachchan home, Amitabh’s mother Teji Bachchan greeted her on the porch with a smile and a hug, and Sonia says she immediately felt relieved. She describes Teji as becoming a mother figure to her, someone who helped, taught and advised her.
During this period, she writes, she spent her time with Rajiv either at the Bachchans’ house or at the home he shared with his mother, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
Mornings with ‘Uncle Bachchan’
Sonia met Amitabh’s father, the poet Harivansh Rai Bachchan, the morning after she arrived. She recalls that he welcomed her briefly and then walked away.
Her room was at the edge of the house. She writes that his footsteps on his early-morning walk would wake her at dawn. After she fell back asleep, his morning prayers would wake her again: he blew a conch shell and then rang a prayer bell.
Language lessons and a piece of advice
