Blooming sari by Javier Moro (translated from Spanish by Milica Maletić) is a book that looks at the fate of a family, the strength of the spirit of a nation, the adventures of a woman who sacrificed everything for the love of her husband and his country. The book follows Sonja Majno, the main character of the novel, starting from her student days, her wedding in New Delhi, which was perceived as a small scandal since it was the wedding of a foreigner with one of the most desirable bachelors in the most populous country in the world. Namely, in 1965, in Cambridge, Sonja Majno, a nineteen-year-old Italian student, met the young Indian Rajiv Gandhi. She comes from a humble family in Luciana, a small town in the hills not far from Turin, and he belongs to the most powerful family in India. It is the beginning of a love story that even death will not be able to stop. For love, an Italian woman leaves her world, her family in which she grew up and merges with a new country, the wonderful India, where there is a cult of twenty million deities, where eight hundred languages are spoken and which has five hundred political parties. Due to her courage, sincerity and dedication, Sonja Majno will become a real goddess in the eyes of one sixth of humanity.
With real narrative magic, Javier Moro tells the saga of the Nehru-Gandhi family, about people caught in the clutches of power, prisoners of a fate they did not choose, the same fate that will make Sonja a symbol of hope in the land of Mahatma Gandhi.
"Red Sari" can best be understood as an epic novel, which above all, speaks of the strength of the spirit of the Indian people, and the author begins it with the funeral of Rajiv Gandhi, the son of Indira Gandhi who became the youngest prime minister in Indian history. Rajiv was a professional pilot, as he had wanted to be since he was a boy, but the circumstances in which he suddenly found himself demanded something else from him. So, although after his marriage to Sonja Majno he had completely distanced himself from politics, after the death of his younger brother in 1980 and the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the leaders of the Congress party convinced him that he should be the prime minister. Thus, in 1984, he achieved a great victory in the elections. As a politician, he set out to dismantle quotas, permits and tariffs, which were the biggest source of corruption. He modernized the economy, telecommunications, education and encouraged science. He improved relations with the US. He sent Indian troops on a peacekeeping mission to Sri Lanka, but it ended badly with the withdrawal of the Indian army. A scandal involving the responsible people of the Swedish company Bofors in relation to the acquisition of cannons in what some said was a questionable manner, shattered the image of Rajiv as an uncorrupt politician, and in 1989 he lost the elections. He remained the leader of the Congress Party until 1991 when he was assassinated during the election campaign. A female suicide bomber killed him in a terrorist assassination because of his involvement in the conflict in Sri Lanka. After that, his wife Sonia Gandhi became the leader of the Congress Party in 1998, and in 2004 she led the party to victory. With that event, Javier Moro begins the main flow of the story of the novel Red saree.
As the author says, at first Sonia Gandhi could not believe that Rajiv, the man of her life, was dead. He was only forty-six years old and everything happened so quickly, brutally, unexpectedly. In their capital, Indians bid farewell to the mortal remains of this distinguished son of the motherland. The casket containing Rajiv Gandhi's body was on display in the grand hall of the residential palace where Rajiv spent his childhood. This was at the time when his grandfather Jawaharlal Nehru was the Prime Minister of India. A large photo of Rajiv with a white wreath was placed on top of the casket wrapped in the saffron flag, white and green, the nation's colors. That day, despite the intense heat, more than half a million people watched the funeral procession, which arrived at the cremation site an hour late. Sonja was inconsolable, she didn't know which god to look to for comfort. She didn't know what kind of god would allow a good man like Rajiv to suffer like that just because of the fanaticism of other people who also have families, who also have children, who also know how to caress and love. The next day, Sonja withdrew into herself in a state of shock. She did not know who her husband's killer was, she only knew that he was constantly suffering and grieving. She suspected the Sikhs who killed Indira, the Hindu fundamentalists who killed Mahatma Gandhi, the Muslim fundamentalists from Kashmir, but also dozens of other terrorist organizations. In the first years after Rajiv's murder, Sonja thought about obeying her mother and sisters and returning to Italy with them. However, all those ideas were immediately dismissed, after in 1998, seven years after the murder of her husband and former Prime Minister of India, the Secretary of the Working Committee of the Congress Party, the strongest party in India, announced to her that she had been unanimously elected as the president of that party. Then Sonja realized again that she belongs to India and that she should fight till death for that country like Rajiv and his ancestors did.
In the book Red saree Moro convincingly writes about Sonja's memories of her homeland in Italy, of her life with her parents and two sisters whom she loved very much. She especially appreciated that her father Stefano never skimped on his daughters. The Lennox Cook School she attended was one of the best and most expensive language schools in Cambridge. Among her literature professors was the famous writer EM Forster. At that time Forster was in his old age and only occasionally came to give a few lectures to the students. Sonja remembered the depressing climate in Cambridge, the cold and damp, the light rain that rarely stopped. At first, she thought that she would never get used to that climate, especially the piercing cold that chilled her bones. Sonja was a shy girl by nature and avoided all socializing even though in Cambridge every fifth resident was a student. It was a city of students, of all nationalities and races, and together they gave the city a cosmopolitan touch. In their free time, students engaged in all possible activities, from sports to dramatic arts, from listening to live music to going on picnics... Sonja was mostly alone. She didn't even hang out with students from Italy, although there were a lot of them, and that would suit her because of the language, because every day she realized more and more that she knew much less English than she thought. However, Sonja preferred to go to Versati, a bar where she could find food similar to her home-made food, which she was used to. At that time, the famous Stephen Hawking, who was conducting cosmological research at the university, was a frequent guest at Versati. In that same bar, through her friend Christian from Germany, Sonja met a guy who stood out for his appearance and manners, as she later described him: withdrawn and kind. It was her future husband Rajiv. Can love come so suddenly, almost brazenly, Sonja wondered when, during a walk, Rajiv once grabbed her hand, and she didn't have the strength to pull it away. In the following days, Sonja tried to fight those feelings towards the guy with big black eyes and a beautiful smile, so that she would later talk about her Indian man, whom she fell in love with so quickly, but she was not successful in that. Whenever he had the chance, Rajiv told Sonia about himself, about his passion for photography, about jazz musicians Stan Getz, Zut Sims and Jimmy Smith, although he also appreciated the Beatles and Beethoven. He often emphasized that his true passion was flying. When he was fourteen years old, his grandfather Nehru took him to make a circle with a paraglider and it was crucial that Rajiv fell in love with flying so much, that feeling of complete freedom and the sweet sound of the wind, that even then he decided to become a pilot. For Sonja, this Indian opened the door to a world unknown to her at that time. He was the opposite of the Italian braggarts and their fabrications that this young girl didn't even care about. As in the book Red saree says, after meeting Rajiv, Sonia's life started to change. One weekend, she also met Rajiv's younger brother, Sanjay, who was two years younger, who was learning the trade at the Rolls-Royce company in Crewe, a small town not far from Cambridge.
These recollections of her student days, going out and walking with Rajiv gave Sonia a hard time. She knew from the stories that her mother-in-law Indira also had a hard time after Nehru's death in 1964, that she recovered slowly, but life presented these two women with new tasks that they had to complete. And Sonia Gandhi, like her mother-in-law Indira earlier, succeeded well in this. One of Sonja's great achievements was the fight against corruption. Even during his lifetime, Rajiv had calculated that 85 percent of all expenses intended for the development of India ended up in the pockets of bureaucrats. In the said book, it is said that Sonia and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh got parliament to pass a law allowing any citizen to scrutinize bids for public tender contracts, thereby avoiding corruption and bribery. Today, Sonja is surrounded by economic development experts and together they made a plan to help and speed up the development of India's rural regions.
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