Living History Unknown (best books to read fiction .txt) 📖

more about grassroots efforts to spur development and women’s rights. I was excited about what I’d be seeing, even though I knew my time and exposure would be limited.

My first day, I had a crowded schedule that included a visit to one of Mother Teresa’s orphanages, where girls far outnumbered boys because daughters were not as valued as sons by their families. Mother Teresa was traveling outside India, but Sister Priscilla gave us a tour. Well-cared-for babies reached out their arms, and Chelsea and I picked them up while Sister Priscilla told us about each one. Some infant girls had been abandoned in the streets; more often they were left at the orphanage by mothers who couldn’t care for them or said that their fathers didn’t want them. Some babies had club feet or cleft lips or other physical disabilities and were abandoned by families too poor to pay for medical treatment.

Many of the children would be adopted by Westerners, although adoption within India was becoming more common. Sister Priscilla told me my visit had caused the local government to pave the dirt road, which she laughingly deemed a minor miracle.

I lunched with a group of Indian women at Roosevelt House, the Ambassador’s residence, and dined with President Shanker Dayal Sharma. The next day, I was scheduled to meet with Prime Minister E V Narasimha Rao. It was important to duplicate whatever I had done in Pakistan, lest I offend either country since I knew that both kept score.

I had agreed to make a major speech on women’s rights at the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation, but I was having trouble writing it. I was looking for one clear image that would express what I wanted to say. At the women’s luncheon, Meenakshi Gopinath, the principal of Lady Sri Ram College, a secondary school, presented me with my inspirationa handprinted poem written by one of her students, Anasuya Sengupta. It was called “Silence,”

and it began:

Too many women

In too many countries

Speak the same language.

Of silence …

I couldn’t get the poem out of my head. As I worked on my speech late into the night, I realized that I could use the poem to convey my belief that issues affecting women and girls should not be dismissed as “soft” or marginal but should be integrated fully into domestic and foreign policy decisions. Denying or curtailing education and basic health care for women is a human rights issue. Restricting women’s economic, political and social participation is a human rights issue. For too long, the voices of half the world’s citizens have not been heard by their governments. The voices of women became my theme, and I decided to end my speech by quoting the poem.

The Rajiv Gandhi Foundation, named for the assassinated Prime Minister, was established by his widow, Sonia, who had invited me to speak. A soft-spoken, Italian-born woman, Sonia Gandhi had fallen in love with Rajiv, the handsome son of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, when they were students at Cambridge University in England. They married and moved to India. From all accounts, Sonia was happily raising two children when catastrophe struck her family. First, her brother-in-law, Sanjay―whom many believed would follow his mother and grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru, into politics―was killed in a plane crash. Then, in 1984, Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her own security guards.

Rajiv, the presumptive heir to Congress Party leadership, became Prime Minister. But while campaigning for election in 1991, Rajiv was murdered by a suicide bomber from the Tamil Tiger guerrillas, who were waging war against the Sri Lankan government and against the Indian government that supported it. Sonia Gandhi was thrust into public life as the symbol of continuity in the Congress Party. She had found her own public voice in the wake of devastating personal tragedy.

By the time I was to deliver my speech, jet lag and sleeplessness had taken their toll. I could barely see the pages, but I concluded with these lines from Anasuya’s poem: We seek only to give words

to those who cannot speak

(too many women

in too may countries)

I seek only to forget

The sorrows of my grandmother’s

Silence.

The poem struck a chord with the audience members, many of whom were touched that I would draw on the thoughts of a schoolgirl to evoke the condition of women everywhere.

Anasuya, lovely, humble and shy in the face of all the publicity her poem generated, was astounded that women all over the globe were requesting copies of it.

Her words also affected my traveling companions in the Washington press corps, who responded personally to what I was saying about women’s lives and rights. Reporters asked me after my speech why I hadn’t addressed these issues sooner. I understood the question, though I had been working for twentyfive years on improving the status and dignity of women and children in America. In this region, where purdah and abandoned baby girls coexisted with women prime ministers, I could see the issue in higher relief―

and so could the press. Health care reform, family leave, the Earned Income Tax Credit or lifting the global gag rule on abortion were all part of the same theme: empowering people to make the choices they decide are right for them and their families. Traveling halfway around the world helped make that clear. Part of the reason was simple: The reporters assigned to cover my trip were a captive audience. But it was also true that my message abroad carried few of the political overtones of my proposals for specific policies at home.

The transformation that took place in my relationship with the press was one of the pleasant surprises of the trip. Like veterans of different armies from an old war, we began our journey wary of each other. But as the days wore on, we began to see each other in a different light. For me, the ground rules helped: Everything that happened on the plane or in the hotels was strictly off-the-record, as was everything that Chelsea said or did on her own. Once I