Picture this. A man is waving an imprint of someone’s palm on a piece of paper at a woman, telling her he can tell the future. The woman does not quite appreciate the idea. He is insistent. A comical scene which, years later, would sound like an omen of tragedy.
She chases him out, yet he says something while scampering out that turns out to be true.
The palmist who had entered the Gandhi family’s Delhi home in the late 1970s predicted that Sonia’s husband Rajiv Gandhi, and not his younger brother Sanjay Gandhi, would one day become prime minister.
Congress Parliamentary Party chairperson Sonia Gandhi with a copy of her memoir. Photo: Getty Images Sanjay Gandhi died in a plane crash in June 1980. Indira Gandhi was assassinated in October 1984, and Rajiv Gandhi was sworn in as prime minister hours later. Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated 15 months later, in May 1991.
Photo: X/@RahulGandhi When she “flew angrily at him to chase him off”, the man turned to run and shouted: ” Nahi, nahi, Sanjay nahi — aapke pati Rajivji ek din pradhan mantri banenge!” (“No, no, not Sanjay, your husband Rajiv will become prime minister one day!”) Former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated on May 21, 1990. The memoir recalls that he took the post despite Sonia’s “tearful pleas”. He told her, “They will kill me anyway. When the couple moved to 10 Janpath on February 5, 1990, where Sonia still lives, several of Rajiv Gandhi’s colleagues had urged him not to take the house “on the ground that it was inauspicious”. Behind the back gate was a mound where an elephant was said to be buried, and opposite it the grave of a Sufi pir. “Neither he nor I were superstitious and laughed it away,” she writes.
