It was high noon when Sonia Gandhi stepped out of the intimidating bulk of the presidential palace, and into the blazing heat of a summer afternoon, and a raging political crisis. She came alone - a slim figure in a light brown and white cotton sari, emerging from a portly white Ambassador moments after her safari-suited bodyguards jumped off the running boards.
Then, the woman who craves privacy but occupies one of the most public positions in society, who is Italian-born though the head of the most quintessentially Indian family, made her bid. With an air of assurance, the unlikely heir to the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, which produced three prime ministers and turned two of those into martyrs, made her bid.
"The Congress party is willing to form a government - on our own," she said in an English heavily laced with an Italian accent. What she did not say - though it was evidence from her solo performance - was this: Sonia Gandhi, aged 51, and a shopkeeper's daughter from a satellite town of Turin, dared to be prime minister. Though shorn of the ageing family courtiers who normally surround her, she betrayed little unease about putting herself up for the scrutiny of nearly one billion Indians. She was relaxed and assured, lingering - by her standards of press access - outside the red sandstone presidential palace for five minutes. She even smiled.
For many Indians, who watched her few utterances that day on the evening news, it was an introduction to the woman who is arguably the most talked-about person in public life in India - and the most unknown. For seven years after her husband, former prime minister Rajiv, was assassinated in 1991, Ms Gandhi retreated into a silence so enveloping that it came to define her.
An Indian citizen only since 1986, Ms Gandhi entered public life only 18 months ago. But now for a day at least, it seemed as if, nearly 52 years after winning its freedom from the British Raj, India would once again have a foreign ruler. The Delhi elite buried their wounded pride beneath sneers about her accent, and jokes about pasta recipes.
But Ms Gandhi's power play collapsed. Two days later, with night falling, she again stood alone outside the presidential palace after the briefest of audiences. This time, she clung to a script. "Today I told the president I tried my best to convince our colleagues and friends in the secular parties to support a Congress minority government," she read, peering through brown-framed reading glasses. "Unfortunately, I could not."
She had helped bring down one government - an odd alliance of more than a dozen parties captained by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party - without mastering the arithmetic for a highly fractured parliament to put another in its place.
The miscalculation left India's president, K.R. Narayanan, no choice: on Monday he dissolved parliament and ordered the third general elections in three years. The Congress took the fall for propelling India to an election nobody wanted.
Ms Gandhi's enemies - in the BJP and among the regional and communist parties still smarting at her refusal to countenance a power-sharing arrangement - rejoiced in her embarrassment. So, some suspected, did the ambitious leaders of her own Congress, who would like to kill off the dynasty that has thwarted their own hopes of running the party. "This has been a conspiracy from her opponents within her party," said a prominent Dalit, formerly untouchable, leader. "They wanted to make her prime minister, and to put her into an impossible position so they could expose her. She would have been finished forever. Once the Sonia Gandhi myth is tarnished forever, who stands to gain?"
Like many a modern myth, Ms Gandhi's is carefully constructed. During the years immediately after Rajiv's death, she was, according to Indian tradition, the perfect widow, retreating to a solitary grief. It was as if her own life ended with her husband's. And yet she revealed a steel core. "She never cried before anybody. I never saw her cry," said one regular visitor during those days.
Until the end of 1997, the script, focusing on the couple's children, son Rahul, now aged 29, who works in London, and married daughter Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, aged 28. She also oversaw a charitable foundation set up in her husband's memory.
But her home in central Delhi, a colonial bungalow of the Raj set on large lawns and hidden from view and potential assailants by high walls with watchtowers at the corners, became a pilgrimage site for the ageing notables of the family's Congress party - who regularly begged her to enter active politics - and for visiting prime ministers and presidents paying homage to a beautiful widow whose husband, Rajiv, like his own mother, Indira, and brother, Sanjay, all died violently.
For Ms Gandhi's fawning loyalists, such untimely deaths are crucial to the family charisma. Party old-timers regularly remind journalists who dare to question Ms Gandhi's qualifications of the "sacrifices to the nation" offered up by a single family with singularly bad luck.
Sanjay died first, in 1980, his private plane falling from the skies over Delhi in an aerial stunt gone horribly wrong, leaving a 23-year-old widow, Maneka, and an infant son, Varun. Indira, shattered at the loss of her younger son, a natural born politician and her anointed heir, cajoled Rajiv into politics and, less than five years later, after she was shot dead by her Sikh bodyguard, he became prime minister.
Rajiv too was assassinated at an election meeting in the south Indian city of Madras, blown to pieces by a Tamil Tiger suicide bomber, who touched his feet in gesture of homage, and then the trigger on the explosives pack strapped to her body.
So it was no surprise why Sonia Gandhi hated politics so. In an unusually candid picture book, Rajiv, published after his death and dedicated to the couple's two children, she maps out the choices for those unfortunate enough to be born to rule. The book bears suspicious similarities to the only interview Sonia has ever given - to a Hindi women's magazine in 1985, as well as a written interview with the Washington Post at around the same time. Together, they constitute the gospel according to Sonia.
Part one: The Life that Rajiv Chose has photographs of the Gandhis at play, relaxed and affectionate, and their children. Part Two: The life that chose Rajiv has harder-edged images of the pale, chubby princeling engulfed by the dark and sinewy Indian masses. It's clear which choice Sonia wanted to make.
"She was not interested in politics, he was not interested in politics. They were young people enjoying themselves like any other folk," recalls B.K. Nehru, Indira's cousin and at 88 the oldest surviving member of the Nehru clan. "He had a passion for all kinds of gadgetry - he had to have the latest in music and computers. She loved children while Maneka did not have the slightest interest even in her own son who was brought up by Sonia with the same tenderness and care as her own children."
And her life was as private as it could be as the daughter-in-law of a prime minister. The couple, who married in 1968, had met three years earlier at the Varsity restaurant in Cambridge, when Rajiv was yet to flunk his final engineering exams, and Sonia, then aged 18, was studying English at a private language school. She was also working as an au pair, a fact regularly flung in her face by the Delhi elite which largely ignored Rajiv and Sonia so long as the original heir Sanjay, and his ambitious wife, Maneka, were around. When dinner table discussion turned to politics, a Sanjay loyalist remembers, "Sonia never had the foggiest idea what they were talking about".
But she had a live-in tutor in realpolitik in Indira Gandhi. Though Indira was initially opposed to a foreign daughter-in-law, Sonia won her over, with the girl from Orbassano, an industrial town near Turin sacrificing her Italian identity in the process. Friends say that though Sonia still rustles up Italian meals, and has taught Italian to her two children, her life is entirely Indian.
Her links to Italy are now confined to the biannual visit to her two sisters and her widowed mother - who reportedly flew to Delhi to attend the swearing-in that was not to be.
She learnt passable Hindi, and gave up western clothes forever. In public she is seen only in saris - some inherited from Indira - or the long tunics and baggy trousers of salwar kameez. In the meantime, the ties with India and Indira grew stronger, and were sealed during the 1970s when Indira suffered a humiliating electoral defeat and the family's finances were at an ebb. "When Mrs Gandhi was out of office, it was Sonia who ran the house, it was Sonia who did the cooking because they could not afford a cook."
In October 1984, once again, it was Sonia who cradled the bullet-riddled body of Mrs Gandhi in her arms for the journey to the hospital. The loyalty continued even after death, with Sonia carrying on the feud that had seen Sanjay's widow Maneka banished from the household. When daughter Priyanka was married two years ago to an exporter of costume jewellery named Robert Vadra, Maneka was not invited, though son Varun was there. Maneka's social banishment to the enemy camp was sealed when she became a junior minister in the ousted BJP alliance.
In the book, Gandhi admits she did all she could to keep Rajiv, an unassuming airline pilot, out of the fray after Sanjay was killed, and his mother wanted someone she could trust by her side. "For the first time in the 15 years we had known each other there was tension between Rajiv and me. I fought like a tigress - for him, for us, and our children, for the life we had made together, his flying which he loved, our uncomplicated, easy friendships and, above all, for our freedom: that simple human right that we had so carefully and consistently preserved," she writes.
"I was angry and resentful towards a system which, as I saw it, demanded him as a sacrificial lamb. It would crush him and destroy him, of that I was absolutely certain."
But last year, she offered herself up to the same system, campaigning for the Congress during the elections. During a gruelling campaign, Sonia logged thousands of miles. Veteran politicians gasped at the similarity of her campaigning style to Indira's - though the trademark rapid walk to the podium predates the television era. On the hustings, Ms Gandhi could never summon up the manufactured warmth of a seasoned politician. She read everything: including perfunctory greetings in Hindi, that were rendered into large-size Latin script for her convenience.
The Congress lost the elections, but Gandhi was widely credited with saving it from absolute disaster. Later, she wrested the party from the dull 82-year-old who was leading it into oblivion, taking over as Congress president. At last, seven years after her husband's death, the party had got its Gandhi glamour back.
Ms Gandhi set about reorganising a party which failed to win a single seat in India's largest state, Uttar Pradesh, once a virtual fiefdom of the Congress. She brought back the old men who had done Indira's bidding, and the baby boomers who had impressed Rajiv with their technical expertise. But as this last debacle shows, the talent mix did not include those who know the real workings of coalition politics.
Despite Ms Gandhi's efforts, she was more a regal presence, than a working pol. "With Rajiv you could say anything to him and he wouldn't mind," said one senior leader. Another, who has been an intimate of the Gandhi household for 30 years, confesses to calling Sonia "madam". But despite her inability to build a quick rapport with party workers, Sonia Gandhi has no trouble communicating her moods: amusement, when her dimples come out and her eyes light up with flecks of green, as well as anger when her jawline tightens, and her customary silence takes on a distinct frostiness.
The coming weeks will test Ms Gandhi's ability to learn from her mistakes. The rapid pace of chance in India now means a politician must possess more than the fabled charisma Ms Gandhi acquired when she married Rajiv. She will need to find the canniness required to navigate the treacherous world of coalition building, where the smaller parties - whose appeal rests primarily on identification with region, caste or religion and is not moored by ideology - are prepared to sell their support to the highest bidder. She may also have to abandon the ageing family courtiers chosen for their loyalty to Rajiv, and her slain mother-in-law Indira. They plotted the Congress's power bid, which failed essentially because they failed to recognise that the days when the Congress was the natural party of governance are gone forever.
Ms Gandhi will also have to gauge how Indians take to her new persona. Her courtiers said this week that it would be "the natural thing" for her to contest elections herself. But the family seat at Amethi, deep within the Hindi-speaking heartland, went to the BJP during last year's elections, and Ms Gandhi may go for a safe seat elsewhere. Many Indians wish she would go even farther. This week, a leader of the BJP alliance was agitating for a constitutional amendment that would bar a foreign-born Indian from holding the office of prime minister. And as many even within the Congress say privately, it's one thing to have a foreigner add a touch of glamour on the campaign trail. It's quite another to foist one on a billion people as a prime minister.