BELONGING - A JOURNEY OF LOVE

PROLOGUE In the course of my political life, I was often asked by friends and family to write down my experiences. They pressed me, arguing that mine was an unusual story: of a girl from a small town in Italy transplanting herself to India, witnessing and later being part of landmark events and changes in the country. So much had been written about me, they insisted, but the real per-son they knew was nowhere in any of those writings. I brushed away the idea. But as the years went by, the chorus persisted until I thought that they could be right; perhaps I did have a story worth sharing. Slowly and hesitantly, I began to put down a few lines. Then the dam burst: Memories came flooding in-details of my family and childhood in Italy, my relationship with Rajiv and with his mother, my getting to know and to love the country of my adoption, how I came to enter politics and lead the Congress Party. Some of the writing of this book was painful: revisiting the traumatic losses I experienced. Some required discretion, as I felt I had to respect the privacy of those close to me my family and friends, whose stories were theirs to tell. In the end I chose to write a personal memoir, one for which politics is the background, a kind of framework. It took me a long time, writing and rewriting, with many breaks in between. And here it is my own story.