Besides Karma, Ruth, and Sonia, the tenants of 55 Tenison Road were mostly language students, and others were at Cambridge University. At different periods, they included a South Asian mathematician, a young Cambridge-area girl named Christine, a German fellow called Thilo Dilthey, and Hans Loeser, a German at the university who stayed for three months one summer. Loeser did not socialize with Sonia and Rajiv outside the house but he did observe that Sonia was quite active: “Very often she was out of the house, she was not very sedentary…all of us were young and going out in the evenings.”
He remembers that various guests of different tenants, including young language teachers would visit at Tenison Road, too. There was always something going on; Thilo Dilthey recalls going to Silverstone with Sonia and Rajiv to watch some car racing. In Cambridge, just as in Giaveno, Sonia was not remembered as being at all retiring; that was a side to her character that would emerge later on in India. “I wouldn’t describe her as being shy. Definitely not! She was very open-minded!” Loeser declares.
She also sometimes displayed a certain fiery Italian temper. One night Loeser and another young man (possibly one of the language teachers) were in the communal kitchen. He remembers the incident because he saw a revealing aspect of Sonia’s personality. She “was cooking spaghetti…she had done everything (to get it ready).” Behind her back, the young man added to the dish “some white powder used in cooking as a taste intensifier, sodium glutamate; if you take too much of it, it doesn’t taste very well. He must have put in quite a dose. We — the young man and I — had been drinking, and we were giggling. Sonia must have noticed that he had prepared something to tease her, and she turned around quite suddenly, astonished, and without saying anything, put the hot spaghetti on his head. He was shouting, and finally laughing; it was really quite funny.” Sonia clearly knew how to make a point in a memorable way.
According to Loeser, Sonia did not suffer any financial problems; she “obviously had enough money even by the end of the month” when he and his friends “sometimes ran out of pocket money”. He believes the relationship between Sonia and her family was good because they were “in close contact,” and Cherry Yorke describes Sonia then as “quite comfortably off.” Another Cambridge friend of Rajiv’s, Tahir Jahangir, remembers Sonia as always being “well dressed, well turned out.”
At the time, the Cambridge male-to-female ratio was 12 to 1, so naturally, with her long dark hair and slim figure, Sonia was one of the most beautiful women in town. Loeser and his friend Thilo Dilthey felt that she was aware of her striking good looks. He recalls Dilthey remarking to him once, “She’s very pretty, but unfortunately, somebody must have told her.” From being a playful child in Giaveno, Sonia had grown into a self-assured young woman. Rajiv was a keen photographer, and as the couple grew close, Sonia became his favourite subject.
(Excerpted with permission from Pan Macmillan India)
SONIA GANDHI
An Extraordinary life, An Indian destiny
Author: Rani Singh
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Pages: xiv+268
Price: 499