Word: indira
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...When Indira Priyadarshini (the second name means Dear to Behold) was born on Nov. 19, 1917, in Allahabad in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, the Nehru family servants gathered around to pay homage to the master's elaborately swaddled infant, and one of them misguidedly congratulated Nehru on the birth of a son. Perhaps he did wish for a political heir; if so, it had to be Indira, for there were to be no other children...
...little girl, Indira liked to climb on a table and, as she recalled, "deliver thunderous speeches to the servants." Once the foreign-made toys had been destroyed, she arranged her Indian-made dolls in Indian circumstances, some as demonstrators marching for independence, some as British police clubbing them on the heads...
...demure and subservient woman who had been found for Nehru by his father; it was an arranged marriage, and the acquired bride was greatly scorned by Nehru's Westernized female relatives. While the men were in prison, Kamala developed tuberculosis, so she was sent to Switzerland to convalesce. Indira went with her, to two bleak years at a school near Geneva; then, after Kamala's death, she went on to Somerville, a women's college at Oxford. One relief from her loneliness was a penniless but galvanizing Indian student in London, Feroze Gandhi...
Feroze had been studying in Allahabad some years earlier when the sickly Kamala collapsed while marching in an anti-British demonstration outside his college. He took her home, became slightly infatuated with her and lingered around the house as a friend of the family's. He hardly noticed Indira, who was five years younger than he. But after the two had returned home to India from blitzed and threatened London, Indira announced in 1941 that they wanted to get married. Nehru was dismayed; he needed Indira to run his household. Feroze had no money, no job. "Nobody wanted that...
Nehru never ceased to make demands on Indira, and his daughter never stopped acceding to them. She repeatedly left Feroze's home to preside over social functions for her father. When Nehru became independent India's first Prime Minister in 1947, Indira moved back into his house with her two sons and became his official host. That was in effect the end of her five-year marriage, though she never divorced Feroze. He won a seat in Parliament in 1952, occasionally made bitter sarcasms about Nehru and died of a heart attack...