New Delhi, Nov 11 (IANS) Visiting the US in 1985 with her husband, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi recalls that she had some unique and, in one case, a series of the most mystifying interactions with the wives of the then President Ronald Reagan and his Vice President George H.W. Bush.
The encounter with Barbara Bush, who gave her a short and “energetic” lesson on equality and empowerment, was unforgettable, Sonia Gandhi writes in her memoir, “Belonging: A Journey of Love”, released on Tuesday.
Sonia Gandhi first contrasted the attitude of their US hosts with those in the Soviet Union, which the Gandhis had visited earlier that year.
She said that the Russians had been “warm and cordial, informal even in their formality within the grand halls of the Kremlin”, and the arrangements had been “unostentatious”, while, on the other hand, the US welcome was “grand and opulent, self-consciously so…”
While the main focus of their trip was the inauguration of the Festival of India in the US, Rajiv Gandhi’s address to a joint meeting of the US Congress, apart from the bilateral talks, they also had some other engagements.
And it was on one of these days, when the Gandhis visited the NASA in Houston along with Vice President Bush and Barbara Bush, that Sonia Gandhi remembers.
She recalls that later in the day, as the two couples were walking to a hall where a banquet in their honour was being held, she was “surprised by an impatient command” from the US Second Lady.
“Mrs Gandhi, don’t walk behind your husband; you must walk by his side”, she recalled Barbara Bush as saying, and “at one point I even felt a less-than-gentle push from her to make sure I remembered her instructions and stayed in step wth Rajiv”.
Comparing Barbara Bush with First Lady Nancy Regan, Sonia Gandhi said that “unlike Mrs Reagan’s studied demeanour and expensive designer clothes and jewellery, Mrs Bush’s style was informal; she dressed unpretentiously and wore her favourite three-string artificial pearls for most occasions”.
However, it was Nancy Reagan who provided the “strange phenomenon” which Sonia Gandhi terms the “Mystery of the Wardrobe”.
“Whatever I wore for each occasion would be matched by Mrs Reagan in the same colours,” she wrote, citing examples, right from their first appearance at the White House lawn.
“… I was wearing a printed silk sari, a red floral design on a salmon background; Mrs Reagan’s outfit was a dress of the same shade… At the White House banquet I wore a Banarsi sari of an unusual grey-green colour; the First Lady welcomed us attired in an ensemble of the very same shade.”
Sonia Gandhi says it recurred too often to be a coincidence and the issue “continues to baffle me”, as arranging to match outfits could not have been easy, when unusual colours were involved, and was someone she knew passing details of what she was going to wear to Nancy Reagan. The biggest question, she says, was what was the whole point of these efforts?
However, she notes that she later found that she was not the only target. She says that once, glancing through photos of her visit, a friend pointed out another example and they went through an album of Indira Gandhi’s US visit and found Nancy Reagan did the same sartorial matching then, too.
–IANS
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