More than thirty bullets, all fired by the men she trusted most in the world. The most powerful woman on the planet fell in her own garden, among the flowers she tended herself every morning, riddled with bullets by the guards whose only mission was to protect her. But what chills the blood is not the way she died, but the fact that she knew it was coming. The day before, in front of a huge crowd, she had uttered a phrase that sounded like a farewell.

She said that if she died one day, every drop of her blood would give strength to her nation. No one understood at that moment that she was announcing her own death. Less than twenty-four hours later, that sentence came true to the letter. Wednesday, October 31, 1984, New Delhi.

A little after nine in the morning. In a residence surrounded by gardens, a sixty-six-year-old woman finishes getting dressed. She chooses a saffron-colored sari, that intense orange which in India symbolizes sacrifice. Her assistants would later say that she was in a good mood that morning.

She had slept little, as almost always, but she seemed serene. She has an important appointment. A British television crew is waiting for her to record an interview with the actor Peter Ustinov. A documentary, nothing extraordinary.

She just needs to cross the garden, go from her house to the adjoining office, and sit down in front of the cameras. A path she has walked thousands of times. She leaves the house. The morning sun falls on the flowers.

She walks slowly on the gravel path, without rushing. At her side, an assistant holds an umbrella to shade her. Everything is normal. Everything is calm.

The birds are singing. The October air is mild. A morning like any other in the life of a head of state. She does not know that she only has a few seconds left to live.

Further away, near a small gate that separates her house from the office, stand two of her bodyguards. Men who have served her for a long time, men who know her routine, her voice, her way of walking. One of them has accompanied her on countless occasions, opened doors for her, watched over her safety. She greets them as she does every day, joining her hands in front of her chest in the traditional gesture of respect.

And then one of them pulls out his revolver. The first bullet strikes her in the abdomen. She brings her hand to her chest and looks him in the eyes without understanding. At that moment, the second guard raises an automatic weapon and pulls the trigger.

A hail of bullets, one after the other. The body of India’s most powerful woman buckles and falls onto the gravel path among the flowers she had watered that very week. Silence. The two men drop their weapons.

One of them says out loud that he has done what he had to do. He does not run, he does not flee; he stands there next to the body. Her assistant screams, someone runs, they lift her from the ground, put her in a car, and take her to the hospital, her sari soaked in blood. The doctors will work for hours, transfuse liters and liters of blood, but there is nothing left to be done.

Indira Gandhi’s body had sustained more than thirty impacts. Outside the hospital, the crowd begins to gather, first dozens of people, then hundreds, then thousands. An entire country holding its breath. But to understand how she arrived at that garden, that orange sari, that betrayal by those who were meant to protect her, one must go back very far, to the beginning, to another large house, another silence, and a little girl growing up surrounded by absence.

The little girl was born on November 19, 1917, in the city of Allahabad in northern India. She was given the name Indira, and from the very first day, everyone expected great things from her. Too many great things, for this was no ordinary family. The Nehrus were one of the most important families in the country: wealthy, cultured, respected.

Her grandfather Motilal Nehru was a brilliant lawyer who had amassed a considerable fortune. The house where Indira grew up was immense, with gardens, servants, and rooms a child could wander through for hours without meeting anyone. But this house, with all its luxury, hid a deep sadness. Indira’s father was named Jawaharlal Nehru, an elegant, passionate man educated at the best universities in England and consumed by an absolute obsession: India’s freedom.

For in those years, India was not a free country. It was a colony of the British Empire, and men like Jawaharlal Nehru had decided to dedicate their entire lives to changing that. That was the world into which Indira was born, a world where politics was not a profession. It was a religion, a war, and above all, a way of abandoning what one loved most.

For to fight against the empire, the Nehrus paid a very heavy price: prison. Again and again. Indira’s father spent entire years behind bars. Her grandfather did, too.

And every time the British authorities wanted to punish the movement, they knew exactly which door to knock on. Thus Indira’s childhood unfolded in a house where adults appeared and disappeared. One day her father was there telling her stories, and the next he had vanished behind prison walls. Her mother was in and out of hospitals.

Her aunts were campaigning, traveling, and being arrested. And in the middle of all this, a lonely little girl. Years later, as Prime Minister, she was interviewed by the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, who asked her about her childhood. According to what Indira herself recounted, there was a scene that repeated itself constantly.

Someone would knock on the door of the big house asking to see the family, and the little girl, very serious, with a heartbreaking calmness, would reply that she was sorry, but there was no one there, that her father was in prison, that her mother was in prison, and that her grandparents and aunt were as well. A seven- or eight-year-old girl opening the door of an immense mansion, repeating this terrible phrase as if it were the most normal thing in the world, with no one behind her. Think about what it means to grow up like that: without the certainty that when you return home, someone will be waiting for you. Indira never had that.

And a child who grows up without that security almost always becomes an adult who cannot fully trust anyone. She grew up surrounded by immense spaces and immense absences. She had no siblings to play with. The family friends were serious adults who talked of revolution.

The visits were from police officers coming to take someone away. Those who knew her as a child remember a quiet, thin, observant little creature, a little girl who spoke little and watched much, who spent hours reading alone, who invented games to keep from feeling the weight of the silence. There was a brief interlude of light. For a time, she was sent to study in a school founded by a famous poet, a place surrounded by trees where classes were held outdoors, where they sang, where they painted.

There, for the first time, Indira seemed to blossom. Far from politics and prisons, she was almost a normal little girl. But this interlude did not last. Her mother’s illness tore her from this refuge and plunged her back into pain, as if life showed her happiness only to remind her immediately that it was not for her.

She learned a lesson very early on that would stay with her for life: that the people you love can disappear at any moment, that affection is fragile, that solitude is not the exception but the norm. But this quiet little girl carried a fire within her. One day, barely twelve years old, she decided she too wanted to fight. She could not go to prison like the adults or give speeches in public squares, but she could do something.

She gathered dozens of children from the neighborhood and formed what she called, half in play and half in earnest, a little children’s army. The children carried secret messages from place to place, hid documents, made flags, stood guard in front of houses, and warned when the police arrived. It is said that hundreds, even thousands, of children were involved in this network. A lonely little girl who spent her days between silent rooms and absent adults had built her own little world, her own troop, her own way of not being alone.

And above all, there was the strangest and most beautiful relationship of her entire childhood: the one she maintained with her father through paper. Jawaharlal spent so much time behind bars that he could hardly see her grow up, but he did not want to disappear from her life entirely. So he began writing her letters, long letters from his cell. He spoke to her about world history, ancient civilizations, rivers and mountains, and the great ideas of humanity.

He wrote to her as if they were conversing by the fireside, even though bars and miles of distance separated them. A little girl sitting alone in a huge room, reading letters from a father she barely saw. Without realizing it, Indira learned to associate love with distance, to love what she could not have near her. A poisoned lesson that would accompany her for the rest of her life.

However, there was a shadow growing in that house, and this shadow concerned the person Indira loved most in the world: her mother. Her mother’s name was Kamala, a beautiful, gentle, deeply religious woman, but also a woman who suffered. She had been plagued since her youth by a lung disease that gave her no respite, and she suffered from something harder to name. She never quite integrated into her husband’s family.

The Nehrus were modern, Westernized, and brilliant. Kamala came from a more traditional, simpler world. The women of the house sometimes looked down on her, and her husband Jawaharlal loved her, certainly, but lived obsessed with politics, always about to leave, always with his head in the revolution. Accounts of the time report painful scenes: family gatherings where Kamala would sit silently in a corner while the more worldly women of the Nehru house shone and conversed in English about books and travel.

Kamala, simpler and more spiritual, remained outside these conversations, and a little girl sitting by her side observed it all. She saw how her mother was treated, saw the pitying smiles, kept silent, and burned inside. Mother and daughter clung to each other in a special way. Indira saw her mother as fragile, sometimes humiliated, cast aside, and something within her rebelled.

Without saying it aloud, the little girl vowed that she would never be a woman others could ignore. What awaited Indira was not a difficult childhood that got better later. It was the first in a long chain of mourning. Kamala’s health worsened.

Indian doctors could no longer do anything, so the family made a decision: she had to be taken to Europe, to the sanatoriums in the Swiss mountains where tuberculosis was treated. And Indira, who was a teenager at the time, was sent with her. That is how a young girl who was barely starting her own life became her dying mother’s nurse. It was the mid-1930s, a clinic lost in the mountains of Switzerland, surrounded by snow and a white silence that covers everything.

A young girl spends her days at her mother’s bedside, holding her hand, reading aloud, wiping her forehead with a damp cloth. She watches how, day after day, the woman who gave her life fades away a little more. Outside, it is cold. Inside, the air smells of medicine and disinfectant.

The doctors come in, examine, leave shaking their heads, and the girl remains there hour after hour, alone with the patient, with no one else. Her father is far away, occupied by politics and prison. The one who is there every day is her. Kamala died on February 28, 1936, far from her country, on foreign soil.

Indira was there. She saw her mother die with her own eyes. She was eighteen years old. She did not just lose her mother; she lost the only person who had made her feel less alone.

And she carried with her a quiet anger: the certainty that her mother had not been cared for as she should have been, that she had been left alone too often, and that she, Indira, would never allow herself to be treated that way. In the midst of this pain, however, someone had appeared. A young man who was by her side during the worst moments of Kamala’s illness, a boy with an intense gaze and an easy smile who had gradually grown close to the family. His name was Feroze.

Feroze Gandhi had no relation to the famous Mahatma Gandhi; it was a pure coincidence of the surname. Feroze belonged to a religious minority, the Parsis, and he was a charming, courageous, and slightly rebellious young man. According to those who knew him, he had been smitten with Indira for a long time. The story goes that it all began with a fainting spell.

Kamala, exhausted by the illness, collapsed one day during a public event. It was Feroze who ran to catch her before she fell, who looked after her, and who never left her side again. From that moment on, he became a constant presence in the family’s life. He traveled all the way to the mountains of Switzerland to accompany them.

He was there in the hospitals, in the endless waiting rooms. For Indira, this young man represented something she had never had: someone who stayed, someone who did not disappear behind prison bars or run off chasing the revolution. A young girl raised among absences could only fall in love with the first person who simply decided not to leave. After her mother’s death, Indira went to study in England at Oxford, far from home, with her father imprisoned on the other side of the planet in a country that was not her own.

And in England, once again, there was Feroze, also studying not far from her, always close. The years that followed were strange years. The entire world was plunging into the Second World War. London was burning under the bombs.

At night, the sirens would wail, people ran to the shelters, and a young Indian woman, thin and with fragile health, wondered what she was doing so far from home in a city that was collapsing. She often fell ill. She had to interrupt her studies several times. She never obtained her Oxford degree, which, according to those who knew her, haunted her like a thorn for years.

She was torn between two worlds: too Western to fully integrate into India, too Indian to feel at home in England, motherless, with a father in prison on the other side of the planet. And in the midst of this whirlwind, Feroze asked her to marry him. She said yes, but the decision triggered a storm, because Indira was Hindu and Feroze was Parsi. In the India of that time, a marriage between different religions was a scandal.

Worse still, Indira was the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru. Her marriage was not a private affair; it was a national matter. Letters of protest arrived, insults, immense indignation. From all corners of the country, messages demanded the cancellation of the wedding.

Indira’s father initially had serious doubts, but in the end, according to accounts of the time, it was Mahatma Gandhi himself who intervened to calm spirits and publicly grant his blessing to the couple. They married in March 1942. Indira was twenty-four. For the first time in a long time, she was no longer alone.

But even her marriage could not escape the shadow of politics. A few months after the wedding, in the midst of the struggle for independence, the couple was arrested. Even their honeymoon ended behind bars. Indira spent nearly a year in prison: the cold, the scarce food, the dirty cells, the confinement weighing on a health that had never been robust.

When they were finally released, they began building a life together, and children arrived. In 1944, a son was born whom they named Rajiv. Two years later, a son named Sanjay. Outside, the world was changing forever.

In August 1947, after decades of struggle, India finally freed itself from the British Empire. The man chosen to lead the new nation, the prime minister of the newly born country, was none other than Indira’s father, Jawaharlal Nehru. Overnight, Indira stopped being just the daughter of an imprisoned politician. She became the daughter of the most powerful man in India.

And it is here that history takes a turn she had never planned, because the new prime minister was a widower. He needed someone by his side, someone he could trust, someone to organize his home, host his guests, accompany him on official trips, to be his eyes and ears. And that someone was Indira. Little by little, almost without realizing it, she went to live at her father’s house.

She became his assistant, his hostess, his confidante. She organized state dinners and received the guests. She was present at important meetings, sitting in a corner, silent, listening to everything. The great leaders of the time sat at her father’s table: presidents, kings, famous revolutionaries.

And a young woman served them, listened to them, learned how they thought, how they lied, how they negotiated. No one was teaching her anything intentionally, but without anyone noticing, the silent daughter of the Prime Minister was becoming the most skillful politician of her generation. But this decision had a price, a huge price. In order to stay by her father’s side, Indira moved away from her husband.

Feroze stayed behind. He had his own career as a combative politician, famous for denouncing corruption and for making even his father-in-law’s government uncomfortable. But while Indira shone in the palace of power, Feroze lived further and further away in another house, in another life. Think of the irony: they had loved each other because he was the one who stayed, the one who did not leave.

And now it was she who had left, she who had chosen her father. The little girl who hated absences had become, without meaning to, the absent one. The marriage began to crack, and those cracks filled with rumors. It was said that Feroze felt humiliated, that the shadow of his father-in-law first, then of his own wife later, weighed on him, that at official dinners he was introduced almost as an escort, not as a man with a name of his own, and that he sought elsewhere the recognition and affection he no longer found at home.

Those close to them maintained that there were other women, betrayals, nights when Indira knew with cold certainty that the man she loved was with someone else. The little girl who had sworn never to be humiliated like her mother now found herself in exactly the same position. But she was not her mother. She did not bow her head.

She did not make a scene, did not cry in public. She simply pulled away, plunged even deeper into work, into politics, into the shadow of her father. She placed a freezing distance between herself and Feroze. They never divorced, remaining united by a thin thread, by the children, by habit, by something neither of them knew how to name.

Until that thread suddenly snapped. In 1960, Feroze suffered a heart attack. His health, already fragile, collapsed. Indira rushed to his bedside.

After all the ice, after all the betrayals, when she saw him in the hospital bed, she became again the young girl who had loved him at her mother’s deathbed. It is said she spent his last nights by his side, caring for him as if time had folded back on itself and they were once again the young people in Switzerland, united by the illness of someone who was fading away. Except that this time, it was he who was fading away. Feroze died at only forty-seven, and something broke inside her.

Years later, recalling that moment, Indira said she had felt completely lost, devastated, with death lodged in her heart. She had distanced herself from him, practically left him, she knew his betrayals by heart, and yet when he died, she felt that she was dying with him. Indira was forty-two. She no longer had a mother, no longer had a husband.

Her father, the last great figure in her life, was aging and weakening. In 1964, he died: Jawaharlal Nehru, the man who had shaped her entire existence, the Prime Minister, the hero of independence, the absent father she had served with devotion for years. During those final years, she had been by his side day and night, nursing him in illness, accompanying him on travels. And when he died, the country lost its founding father, but she lost the last person in the world who connected her to anyone.

At forty-six, Indira Gandhi was once again completely alone. Or at least, that is what it seemed. For this is where the story changes forever. With Nehru dead, the country needed a new leader.

The men who controlled politics thought of Indira. But they did not choose her for her merits. They chose her because they believed she would be easy to control. They saw her as a silent widow, an obedient daughter, a woman with no real experience and no ambition of her own, who carried the magical name of Nehru and could be useful as a public face, while the real leaders pulled the strings from the shadows.

They underestimated her. They underestimated her monumentally. In 1966, after the unexpected death of the Prime Minister who had succeeded her father, Indira Gandhi was sworn in as Prime Minister of India. Hundreds of millions of people, dozens of different languages, religions that had clashed for centuries, immense poverty: she was at the head of it all, a middle-aged widow in fragile health.

Many looked at her with a mix of curiosity and contempt. The men of the party called her with disdain a simple doll, a decorative figure they would maneuver as they pleased. They did not know who they were dealing with. For this little girl who had organized a children’s army, this teenager who had seen her mother die, this wife who had resisted betrayal without breaking, possessed a will of steel hidden beneath her fragile appearance.

The confrontation came quickly. The old party leaders told her how to govern, who to appoint, what to say and what to keep quiet. One of them called her in private the mute doll. She listened to them, she smiled, and she waited for her moment.

When that moment arrived, instead of submitting, she split the party in two. She took the majority of the members with her and left the old leaders alone on the other side, reduced to an empty shell. In a single stroke, the mute doll had decapitated the puppet masters. In a few years, she went from the doll they were going to manipulate to the absolute mistress of Indian politics.

The people began to adore her. For millions of poor Indians, especially in the countryside, she was not just another politician. She was a mother, a goddess, a protector. And then came her moment of absolute glory.

In 1971, a terrible conflict broke out in the region. In neighboring Pakistan, a brutal crisis was unleashed. Millions of desperate refugees began to cross the border into India, fleeing the violence: ten million people, entire families walking for days carrying what little they had been able to save. The camps were filling up.

The world was looking elsewhere. Indira traveled to the great capitals to ask for help, to warn of the catastrophe. And when she realized that no one would lift a finger, she acted alone. India went to war.

In barely thirteen days, the Indian army won a crushing victory. From this conflict was born a new country, Bangladesh. It was the highest moment of her entire career. Her supporters compared her to a warrior goddess riding a tiger.

She was, without a shadow of a doubt, the most powerful woman on the planet. But absolute power hides a poison. While the crowds chanted her name, in the heart of this woman there was no peace. There was the same emptiness as always, the same solitude of that little girl who grew up alone.

She was surrounded by people, yet there was no one. She distrusted everyone, and with each passing year, this distrust grew deeper. She surrounded herself with an increasingly restricted circle. She alienated those who thought differently.

She began to see enemies everywhere, and sometimes she was not wrong, for in her world, enemies were real. But the more she protected herself, the more alone she found herself. And the more alone she was, the more she relied on the only two people she felt she could trust: her sons. Of her two sons, Indira had a particular weakness for the youngest, Sanjay.

Rajiv, the eldest, was calm, discreet, an ordinary man who wanted a normal life. He had become an airline pilot. He had married for love, to a young Italian woman he had met in England. He had two children.

Power did not interest him; he avoided politics like a disease. Sanjay was the complete opposite: ambitious, impatient, domineering, a young man with no experience but a fierce hunger to command, impulsive, used to no one ever saying no to him. And his mother, this iron lady who trusted no one else in the world, trusted him blindly. She threw the doors of government wide open to him, gave him immense power for someone who had been elected by no one, who held no real official position.

Sanjay began giving orders to ministers and behaving as if the entire country belonged to him. And that was the beginning of the end. In the mid-seventies, Indira’s power began to waver. The economy was failing, prices were rising, protests grew in the streets.

Then a court found her guilty of irregularities during her last election, and the verdict threatened to annul her victory and force her out of government. In any normal democracy, this would have meant resigning. Indira did not leave. Instead, she made the darkest decision of her entire career.

She declared a state of emergency. In practice, she suspended democracy. She imprisoned her opponents, thousands of them, overnight. She silenced the newspapers.

Censors decided what could be printed and what could not. She concentrated all power in her hands and those of her son Sanjay. For nearly two years, India, the world’s largest democracy, ceased to be free. Under this state of emergency, terrible abuses were committed, many bearing the mark of Sanjay.

Entire poor neighborhoods were razed by bulldozers, demolishing houses while families were still inside. Forced programs were imposed, humiliating the country’s most vulnerable people. Behind every statistic hid a face: an old man watching the house of his whole life fall, a mother running with her children through the rubble. The protective goddess of the poor had become, for many of them, something very different.

How could this sensitive little girl, this woman who had suffered so much, allow so much suffering? Perhaps because power changes people, perhaps because the fear of losing everything made her ruthless, or perhaps because, deep down, she remained that little girl terrified of being left alone, ready for anything not to lose the only thing she had left. We will never fully know. Confident in her strength, Indira called for elections.

She was certain she would win. She was wrong. In the 1977 elections, Indira Gandhi lost. She lost the government.

She lost her seat. From the top of the world to nothingness. The months that followed were bitter. She faced investigations, public humiliations, and even a brief arrest.

The most powerful woman on the planet suddenly found herself treated like a delinquent, alone, attacked from all sides. Anyone else would have retired to live out the rest of their days in silence. Not her. With a determination that left everyone speechless, Indira began to rebuild from scratch.

She traveled across the country again, kilometer after kilometer, returning to the poorest villages, to the dirt roads, to the forgotten places where people still loved her. She sat with the peasants, listened to their grievances, made promises, and apologized in her own way without ever quite admitting she had been wrong. There was one episode that became legendary: in a region struck by tragedy, when no other politician dared to go, Indira traveled there under impossible conditions to reach the people who were suffering. This image, of a small woman standing where no one else would go, left a deep impression.

The government that had replaced her was weak and divided. Its members quarreled among themselves, failed to govern, and the people grew weary. In 1980, barely three years after her humiliating defeat, the unthinkable happened. Indira Gandhi won again.

She returned to power, stronger than ever, leaving stunned all those who had declared her politically dead. It was her great resurrection, the triumph of an impossible comeback. This return should have been the happiest moment of her life. It was the beginning of the worst nightmare, because just a few months later, in June 1980, a tragedy occurred that broke her inside forever.

Sanjay, her beloved son, had a new passion: flying. He loved small planes, aerobatics, risk, speed, danger. That morning, he climbed into a light aircraft and took off over Delhi. He began performing risky maneuvers in the air, sharp turns and spins closer and closer to the ground.

He lost control. The plane nose-dived under the eyes of those on the ground. Sanjay died instantly. He was only thirty-three.

Those who were close to her that day said that when she was told the news, Indira did not scream and did not collapse before the cameras. She kept her face rigid, controlled, just as she had learned to do all her life. She went to the scene of the accident and, according to witnesses, asked for her son’s glasses, his watch, small intimate details, as if by clinging to his objects she could hold on to him for one second more. A mother searching for her dead son’s glasses among the wreckage of a plane.

There is no power in the world that can protect one from such pain. Those who knew her closely say she was never the same again, that she aged suddenly in the space of a few weeks, that her hair turned white and her gaze grew dark. In her grief, she made a decision that many understood as a desperate attempt not to end up completely alone. She called back her other son, Rajiv, the quiet one, the pilot, the one who only wanted a normal life with his family.

Rajiv did not want politics; he was afraid of it, he had seen what it did to his family. But his mother needed him. She was alone, aged, broken, and he could not refuse. He left behind the airplane cockpit, the quiet life, and the simple plans he had made for himself.

Remember this moment, for this small gesture from a grieving mother would sow the seeds of another tragedy years later. Meanwhile, the country Indira governed began to ignite from another direction. In a region of northern India, a serious and dangerous conflict was growing. A religious group was demanding more autonomy, and within this movement, an armed faction was gaining strength and becoming increasingly violent.

Its leaders entrenched themselves inside one of the most sacred temples in the country, a place of immense spiritual importance for millions of people. The situation became unbearable. There were deaths. The movement radicalized week after week, and Indira’s government felt it was losing control of an entire region.

For months, she sought other solutions: negotiations, pressure, warnings. Nothing worked. And in June 1984, Indira made a terrible decision. She ordered the army to enter that sacred temple to forcefully expel the armed men.

The military operation was extremely harsh, much more than anyone had anticipated. Those under siege were better armed than thought and resisted with ferocity. There was a brutal clash that lasted several hours. Inside and around the compound, many people died: soldiers, fighters, and also ordinary pilgrims caught in the crossfire.

The temple, one of the most sacred sites of that faith, was damaged by the fighting. For the government, it was a necessary operation to restore order. But for millions of believers across the country and around the world, it was an unforgivable wound. In the hearts of many, a desire for revenge was born.

Indira knew it. Her security advisors warned her that people wanted to kill her. They insistently recommended she change some of her bodyguards, particularly those who belonged to this wounded religious community. She refused.

She said she did not discriminate against her people based on their religion, and that if she began to dismiss her guards because of their faith, she would betray the values of all India, this country of a thousand religions that she swore to represent and protect. Some say it was a gesture of deep conviction. Others think that, deep down, this woman exhausted by so much loss was no longer so afraid of death; since she had buried almost everyone she loved, dying had ceased to be the worst thing that could happen to her. Be that as it may, she kept all her guards, including the man who, a few months later, would be the first to shoot her.

It was a noble gesture, and it was also the decision that killed her. In the last weeks of her life, something changed within her. Those around her noticed it. She became more melancholic, more reflective, and began to speak of death with a calmness that gave people goosebumps.

A few months before the end, during a private conversation, she said that a long life did not interest her, that she had already lived enough, that she had seen and suffered enough. She said it without drama, without fear, like someone stating a fact. It is said she ordered some of her personal affairs to be put in order, that she went through old papers, that she left some things arranged like someone carefully preparing a farewell. She even wrote a few lines, almost a testament of the soul, in which she asked that if she were to die a violent death, there should be no hatred in her name, and that no bitterness should be great enough to poison her love for her people.

She left it written before anything happened, as if she already knew, as if she were only waiting for the date. And yet, there was still something that held her to life. In her house lived two small children, Rajiv’s sons, her grandchildren. In them, she found in the evening a final refuge from loneliness.

She played with them, took care of them. With them, for a moment, she became something other than the most powerful and heavily guarded woman in the country: simply a grandmother. Then came her final full day of life. On October 30, 1984, a day before the garden, a day before the bullets, Indira traveled to a city in the east of the country to give a speech before a massive crowd.

And there, before thousands of people under a heavy sky, she spoke the words that would become her epitaph. She said that she was alive that day, but that she might not be tomorrow. She said that she would continue to serve her country until her very last breath. And then she uttered the sentence the whole world would remember: if she died, every drop of her blood would give strength to the nation.

The crowd applauded without fully understanding what they had just heard. She, however, understood perfectly. That evening, so the story goes, she returned home with a strange serenity. She dined with her family.

She was with her grandchildren like someone who had already made peace with the inevitable. And the next morning, she put on the saffron-colored sari, the color of sacrifice, went out into the garden, and walked calmly toward the two men waiting for her with their loaded weapons. One of the guards, the one who fired the first shot with his revolver, was a man who had served her for years. A man she trusted, a man she had personally defended when she was asked to have him removed.

She protected him, and he killed her. When they finished firing, the two assassins did not flee. They surrendered. One of them said quietly that he had done what he had to do.

They had waited for this moment, planned it, and let her approach, greet them with joined hands, trusting, only to shoot her at point-blank range. The perfect betrayal, the betrayal of those closest. Exactly what she had feared all her life since she was a little girl. She was taken to the hospital.

The doctors fought for hours. They transfused huge amounts of blood into her, trying to replace all that she had lost in the garden. But it was impossible. Her body had suffered too much damage for any medicine in the world to remedy.

Outside, the news began to spread like wildfire. People gathered in the streets, first by the tens, then by the hundreds, then by the thousands. Many were crying, not yet knowing if she was alive or dead. Others were praying.

Her son Rajiv was far away, touring another region. When they gave him the news, he flew immediately toward the capital. On the way, they confirmed what he already feared. His mother had not survived.

The quiet man, the pilot who had only wanted a normal life, landed in Delhi, suddenly transformed into the new master of India’s destiny. Indira Gandhi was declared dead that same afternoon. And it is here that the most chilling irony of her entire story appears. She had said the day before that every drop of her blood would give strength to the nation.

And when the news of her assassination spread, the country exploded, but not in the way she would have wanted. It exploded in violence. In the days that followed her death, a terrible wave of fury was unleashed against the religious community to which her assassins belonged. Enraged mobs roamed the streets in search of revenge.

Thousands of innocent people were attacked, hunted, burned, and murdered solely for their faith. Entire families destroyed, entire neighborhoods set on fire, people who had nothing to do with the crime paying with their lives for the color of a turban. It was one of the worst tragedies in India’s modern history. Her blood did not give strength to the nation.

Her blood triggered a bloodbath. It was the last and most bitter of ironies in a life marked by tragedy. Days later, they bid her farewell on the banks of a sacred river. Her body, wrapped in flowers, burned on a wooden pyre before a huge crowd.

Millions of people came, from the most remote corners of the country: peasants, workers, women with children in their arms, old people who had voted for her their entire lives. And there, once again, lay the great paradox of her existence. The woman who had felt alone at every stage of her life, the little girl in silent rooms, the cast-aside wife, the leader surrounded by traitors, was accompanied in death by an ocean of people who mourned her, millions who loved her, and she was no longer there to feel it, as if fate had denied her, until the very last moment, the one thing she had always sought: to truly feel accompanied. And yet, even with her death, this family’s curse did not come to an end.

Remember Rajiv, the quiet son, the pilot, he who only wanted a normal life and whom his mother, in her solitude, had brought back to politics after Sanjay’s death. After Indira’s assassination, Rajiv became Prime Minister of India. He took his mother’s place, bearing, without ever having asked for it, the weight that had destroyed almost everyone of his blood. And years later, in 1991, while he was campaigning among the crowd, a woman approached him, pretending to greet him with respect.

She was carrying explosives hidden under her clothes. She bowed before him as if to touch his feet in a sign of reverence, and at that instant, she detonated the bomb. Rajiv Gandhi died assassinated like his mother, torn apart like his mother, betrayed by a gesture of false affection like his mother. Do the math.

A mother who dies of tuberculosis far from home. A husband who dies of a heart attack with a love half-lived. A father who dies exhausted by power. A son who dies crushed in a light aircraft.

A woman riddled with bullets by her own guards, and another son torn apart by a bomb. This is why many began to call this family by a name that makes one shudder: the Kennedys of India. A brilliant, powerful dynasty, adored and pursued by violent death from generation to generation. Was it a curse?

Was it the price of power, or is it simply what happens to those who live too close to the fire of history? But if we go back to the beginning of it all, beyond politics, beyond wars and governments, what remains is the story of a deeply lonely woman. A little girl who grew up alone in a house too big, surrounded by silence and absence. A teenager who watched her mother die on foreign soil.

A betrayed wife who buried the man she loved without having been able to quite forgive him. The most powerful woman on the planet, surrounded by millions of admirers, who deep down had no one to truly trust. A mother who searched for her son’s glasses among the wreckage of a plane, and an old woman who sensed her own death and walked toward it wearing the color of sacrifice without taking a step back. Indira Gandhi had all the power that a human being could desire.

She governed hundreds of millions of people, changed the map of the world, won wars. And yet, from the first to the last page of her life, the same shadow accompanied her: loneliness. Her name is still alive today, in history books, in debates, in the streets and squares that bear her name. For some, she was a great leader, a woman who placed her country among the great powers of the planet and who feared no one.

For others, she was an authoritarian ruler, ready to suspend democracy to hold onto power. She was both at the same time. She was all of that at once. She once said that she had paid for everything she had done and also for what she had not done, that life had made her pay for every decision one by one, without forgiving her for any of them.

At the end of the day, the question is perhaps not how far she reached in power, but how much love she lost along the way. At the end of the road, when power fades and the crowds return home, it is the only thing that truly matters. And it was always that which the most powerful woman in the world lacked.