KAMLA NEHRU  

Indira Gandhi suffered from Tuberculosis, while her mother Kamala Nehru died of Tuberculosis in clinique Sylvana in Lausanne in Switzerland.

In the opening chapter of his autobiography  “Descent from Kashmir”, Nehru writes over two hundred year ago, an ancestor came down from that mountain valley (Kashmir) to seek fame and fortune in the…plains below .The particular ancestor Nehru refers to was a hindu Pandit- one of the Brahmin elite of Kashmir named Raj Kaul, a Sanskrit and Persian scholar, who left Kashmir around 1716 for Delhi. Here he became a member of the court of the Mughal Emperor  Farukhsiyar who granted Raj Kaul a house situated on a canal to be known as Kaul-Nehru after nahar, which means canal, and in time this was shortened to Nehru.

            From the beginning, the Nehru family was allied to power . First this was the power of the Mughal Emperor and when his empire declined, the might of the British. Raj Kaul’s great-grandson, Lakshmi Narayan, became one of the first Indian Vakil, or Lawyer of the East India company in Delhi, and his son , Gangra was a police officer in the city when the Mutiny broke out in 1857. In the upheaval of the 1857 uprising, Ganga Dar fled with his family to Agra. He died four year later and three months after this death his wife gave birth to a posthumous son who named Motilal.

Motilal married while still in his teens and had a son, but both wife and son died in childbirth before Motilal was twenty by 1887. Motilal remarried a beautiful young  woman, also of Kashmir extraction, named Swarup Rani. The young couple moved to Allahabad, some 500 miles from Delhi in U.P, where Motilal pursued a brilliant legal career and prospered both professionally and personally and soon became one of the wealthiest and most socially prominent citizen. His first child ,a son named Jawaharlal.

Indira Gandhi’s father was born on 14, November 1889. In 1900 Motilal moved his family to mansion named “Anand Bhawan- the Adobe of Happiness”. By the time Jawaharlal was sent to Public school in Harrow,England in 1905. He had a little sister named Sarup Kumari, born in 1900. Another sister Krishna, arrived in 1907.(A second son, born in 1905 survived only a month).

Jawaharlal entered the legal profession without demur. But he put up something of struggle before he agreed to marry the woman his father chose for him. By the time he returned to India in 1912, England had transformed Jawaharlal. At Cambridge he mixed with a set who read Havelock Ellis and Krafft-Ebing and considered himself very sophisticated and talked for sex and morality, though Nehru adds that ‘ in spite of our brave talk, most of us were rather timid where sex was concerned ‘. His own sexual knowledge, he says, was ‘for many years, till after I left Cambridge…confined to theory’.

            The selection of bride was made before Jawaharlal returned to India , his father wrote to him that he had decided that his son’s future wife should be a twelve year old girl named Kamla Kaul. “A little beauty and…very healthy “, as Motilal described her. Kamla was the daughter of  a conservative Kashmiri family who lived in Delhi. The contract between two families had been drawn up and the dowry agreed on, Motilal informed his son. All JawarharLal had to do was give his assent.   

            In 1915 when Kamla was sixteen, she came to live in Allahabad in order to be groomed as Jawaharlal’s wife . Coming from a traditional Kashimiri family Kamla was ignorant of European manners and habits. The Nehru daughter’s governess Miss Hooper,Undertook Kamala’s training in the use of cutlery and speaking English. Kamla was a serious , intense, highly strong girl of beauty but there was shy and withdrawn it was difficult for Motilal and Jawaharlal to discern how strong and stubborn she could be and how committed Kamla was to her principle.

            The marriage date was selected by family astrologers; 8 February 1916 which was Basant panchami, Nehru wedding camp was setup outside Delhi for this marriage.

            The newly-weds honeymooned in Kashmir just as 26 years later their daughter would go to Kashmir with her Bridegroom. Arriving in Srinagar Jawaharlal left her bride to go climbing for several weeks with a cousin in the mountain of Ladakh. The remote, Eastern region of Kashmir. No one seems to have thought this an odd way for a young man to spent his honeymoon.

            Indira was born on the stormy night of 19th November,1917 in Anand Bhawan

Weighing scarcely four pounds with a delicate mouth and (to her lasting grief) an overgenerous nose.

            Because Kamla was relatively unsophisticated, reserved and could not speak fluent English, she was looked down upon by her mother-in-law and two sisters-in-law,Especially sarup or Nan who did nothing to hide her possessive love of her brother and her scorn for his unwesternized wife. The female household at Anand Bhawan was in fact rife with jealousy , hostility and resentment, and for many years Kamla suffered intensely in this atmosphere. Illness would confine her to her room and take her out of the fray. But not surprisingly, when she migrated to the hills, in the company of her mother-in-law and sisters-in-law, her health failed to improve.

There was another constant source of tension and heartache was the hostility of Nan (Mrs Vijay Lakshimi Pandit) to Kamla Nehru. She resentment Kamla from the moment of her marriage, the jealous, atmosphere at Anand Bhawan was only slightly alleviated when Nand married Ravijit Pandit in 1921. Slights  and insult continued Kamla gave birth to a boy in the month November 1924. But he was premature and died 2 days later. Kamla was devastated.  

            Almost immediately she fell ill with a cough and high fever and was taken from Anand Bhanwan to the European ward of Lucknow Hospital. British doctor diagnosed pulmonary Tuberculosis for the first time; a judgement that sounded like a death sentence. After years of malingering, Kamla’s symptoms were suddenly transformed into illness, which at that time was often fatal.

            She remained in hospital, well into the new year, Jawaharlal shuttled back and forth between Allahabad and Lucknow, but Indira was not allowed to visit her. Despite the best possible medical care, Kamla failed to improve in Lucknow. Motilal and Jawaharlal summoned the prominent physician and nationalist leader, Dr M.A Ansari, who found Kamla’s condition so serious that he did not broach the expected alternative of a rest cure in the hills. Instead he urged Jawaharlal to go to Switzerland to consult Tuberculosis specialist in Geneva with whom Ansari was in contact. So the Pandit (Nan and her husband Ranjit Pandit) and Nehru’s sailed on the Lloyd Liner Triestino from Bombay on 1st March 1926. In 1926 it was a long journey from Bombay to Venice, as air journey had not been introduced: tense relation between Kamla and Nan eased when Kamla came down with an attack of bronchitis and was confined to her cabin . Kamla still had a high fever when they reached Italy.

            As soon as they landed, the Pandits rushed off on their European holiday, but Kamla was too ill too to travel further so the Nehrus stopped for three days in Vanice.

For several months they lodged in cheap pensions until they found a two-bedroom flat at 46 Boulevard Des Tranches. Jawaharlal was to live very frugally as possible. Kamla consulted medical specialist at the famous Geneva research institute of the Swiss Bacteriologist Henri Spahlinger as soon as they arrived in the city, laboratory tests revealed TB bacilli in her sputum -confirming the Lucknow doctors’ diagnosis. She then underwent a course of spahlinger serum vaccine, which cost more than 200 pounds- a large sum in 1926. This controversial vaccine was an anti-tuberculosis serum derived from the blood of horses, though its source and nature were kept secret. Indira was admitted to a good school, it was for the first time that Jawaharlal , Kamla and Indira were together as a family away from the oppressive attention of Anand Bhawan in-laws.

            Back in Geneva , by the summer Kamla had finished her expensive course of spahlinger serum vaccine. On 11th August Nehru wrote to his old friend Syed Mahmud, ‘Kamla is doing well . so Indu who is in the mountains. As for me I am flourishing like the proverbial Green Bay tree. But a month later, on 12 September, he reported to Mahmud that ‘ Kamla I am sorry to say has not been keeping very well’. She was running a temperature again and the doctors’ verdict was that ‘ the disease is present still’. The specialists now advice that Kamla be moved to Montana, a resort high in the ALPS in Valais canton southeast of Lake Geneva. In mid October she, Nehru and Betty journeyed up into the mountains to Montana and doctor Theodore Stephani’s famous Tuberculosis sanatorium ‘Le Stephani’ which had been a magnet for wealthy consumptives since it was established in the 1890’s.

In November, to celebrate her ninth birthday, Indira traveled on her own from Chesieres to Montana to see her  parents. She stayed with Nehru in a small pension closed to the sanatorium and visited her mother twice a day. For Montana was a resort- a play ground for the Leisured rich as well as a refige for the ill and dying; on the one hand there was the sanatorium for Tuberculosis patients- many of them ‘advanced cases’-where her mother lay in a white-sheeted bed in a room with windows and doors opened wide to the cold mountain air.

Slowly Kamla improved at doctor Stephani’s sanatorium and increasingly Nehru and his sister Betty were able to leave her and make brief trips to Paris, Berlin, London, and in February 1927 to Brussels for the congress of Oppressed nationalities: back home Motilal constructed a new Anand Bhawan. Kamala was restless, unhappy and eager to leave Montana. Motilal seek them a draft of 500 pounds and Jawaharlal , Kamala, Betty and Indira set off from Montana on 1st May , 1927 they reached Paris. As the  days wore on Nehru and Indira continued their sight seeing  in Paris, Kamala increasingly stayed behind in the hotel, plagued by many of her old symptoms-headaches, ‘ heart attacks’ as she called her palpitations, lack of appetite, faintness and fatigue. She also became deeply depressed . In summer of 1927 she wrote to Syed Mahmud, who had taught her Urdu, and during the lesson an emotional intimacy developed between them and hence she confided in him as she might have to a brother. Kamala makes know pretence of being well or happy; ‘ A constant illness renders life unbearable…I am of no use to the world and am making it heavier everyday by doing nothing; only eating and sleeping…I am a burden to everybody. And in another letter, dated 4 May, her mood is even darker; ‘death is better then such a life, but even death is frightened of me’. Eventually Nehru urged that they go onto London, so they reached London 1st June. Kamala dislikes it as on every step they were treated as slaves. As she wrote to Syed Mahmud : from England the Nehru went to the Berlin and Heidleberg in early July- in August they returned to London. Motilal arrived in early September 1927 and more medical specialists were consulted. Nehru finally decided to return to India . Kamala was by no means fully recovered but her tuberculosis seemed to be in a abeyance. The Nehru reached south India on Christmas Day 1927.(Madras). They took train to Delhi and onward to Allahabad after nearly 2 years.

Kamala got pregnant again and she desperately wanted the child. To her grief, however, in the last spring of 1928 she lost the baby in the third month of pregnancy. Immediately after her miscarriage she developed violent stomach pains and had to be operated upon for appendicitis. When she came home from the hospital after the operation, she became depressed and ill. Gandhi sent his own medical advise to Nehru.’I utterly distrust the doctors‘ repots about Kamala… I wish you and father and Kamala will make up your minds for her to take to the natural treatment, that means Kuhne’s baths and sun baths. Sun baths are now in vogue even amongst the medical profession and very extra ordinary results are claimed for them’.  

Kamala kept to her room and was neglected by rest of the household and were utterly indifferent to her poor physical and mental state. In May, when temperature soared, Kamala, Indira and the other women in the family went to Mussoorie.

In March 1930 Gandhi organized ‘Salt Satyagraha & civil disobedience. These resulted in massive involvement of Indian women, among these indeed leading them in Allahabad, were the Nehru women, especially Kamala who rose from her side bed, put  on a white Khadi congress volunteer uniform. Kamla’s physical ailment and lassitude disappeared or were ignored by her. Much later Nehru realize that she had been longing ‘To play her own part in the national struggle and not to be merely a hanger-on and a shadow of her husband’, but it was only in the early months of 1930, he said, that ‘ I sensed her desire and we work together and I found in this experience a new delight’.

It was in March 1930, the month the Vanar Sena(monkey brigade-of children) was formed, that Kamla and Indira met Feroze Gandhi when they went with  a band of a congress women to picket the British-staffed Ewing Christian college in Allahabad. Feroze, an 18-year-old student at the college , was lounging with his friends on a wall watching the women demonstrators with wry amusement when Kamala fainted in the mid-day sun . He ran for water and a fan to revived her , and in the process of helping Kamala and taking her home, feroze was converted to her cause- or perhaps more accurately, to Kamal herself. The  next day he dropped out of Ewing Christian College, reappeared at  Anand Bhawan and signed up as a congress volunteer. Hence forth Feroze Gandhi’s was Kamla’s shadow and disciple. Inevitably this meant that he saw a great deal of Indira to, through a number of months Indira did not differentiate between this plumb, loquacious Parsi boy and the other adoring assistants Kamla attracted.

On 17th November, two days before Indira’s 13th birthday, she , Kamala, Sarup Rani and Betty took Motilal to Calcutta to consult an Ayurvedic doctor, Kaviraj Symdas Vachaspati. Motilal, who was now 69, was suffering from a variety of ailments, including asthma, fibroses of the lungs, high blood pressure and kidney failure, none of which was responding to conventional treatment.

On new year eve Kamala was arrested by the British police and lodged in Mallaca jail in Allahabad. One and half mile away Nehru was in Naini Jail. On 26th January 1931. she was released with Nehru, Motilal died on 6th February 1931.

On 15th January 1934 Nehru and Kamal had gone to Calcutta again for specialist medical treatment and also to visit  Rabindranath Taogore’s school at Santiniketan, some hundred miles northwest of Calcutta. Nehru was arrested and sentenced for 2 years in jail in Calcutta. Kamala and her mother in-law migrated tom Calcutta to be near him. Kamala spent a great deal of time  in religious devotion at Ranaksrishna Messoor which she visited daily.

In early August Kamala had a severe attack of pleurisy and was gravely ill with high temperature and breathing difficulties. Indira returned from Santiniketan, where she had been admitted. Because Kamala’s condition was so critical Nehru was realized from jail. By the following week Kamla had improved slightly on 23rd British authorities informed Nehru that his compassionate leave had expired and he was sent back to Dehra Dun prison.

Life for Kamala at Anand Bhawan remained lonely and discordant. In October, Indira was summoned home once again to accompany her mother to the hill station of Bhowali where she could be treated at the British-run King Edward VII Sanatorium. Indira packed her mother suitcase and then she , Kamala, Dr. Madan Atal, feroze Gandhi and Nehru’s servent Hari Lal all made the long journey first by train and then by car to Bhowali on 10th October. A week later Nehru was tranfered from Dehra Dun to Almora Jail, close to Bhowali, So that he could visit Kamala at three week intervals. Kamala spent the next nine months badly disease and she began to undergo Artificial pneumothorax-an unpleasant and risky treatment during which a needle was inserted into the chest every few days in order to collapse the lungs by injecting air into the pleural cavity. Kamala was given Morphia the night before her ‘gassings', and the next day she had a local anesthetic before the doctor pierced her chest with a hallow needle and pumped in oxygen. Artificial pneumothorax did not work immediately and sometimes it did not work at all when successful, it took five or six additional injections administered over a fortnight to collapse the lung and then it had to be maintained by regular ‘refills’. Serious complications, including gas embolism, pleural shock and infection (often fatal in the days before antibiotics), were not uncommon. But despite these risks artificial pneumothorax was a popular procedure because it was thought that if the disease lung were collapsed. It could rest and heal itself and the patient might make a  full recovery.

            Indira stayed with her mother at Bhowali almost a month. On  1st November she wrote to her father,’ The last few days have not been good ones for mummi, her temperature rising … and she felt rather weak and low. Day before yesterday AP[Artificial pneumothorax] was performed for the fifth time. But Kamala she added had managed to gain three-pound and now weighed 80 lbs.

            On the night of 31st December, 1934 Jawaharlal and Indira were both with Kamala (and Feroze) at Bhowali to see in the new year. Later Nehru wrote in his diary that they talked and talked about their life and that of Indira, but when Nehru visited Kamala next, at the end of January she had greatly changed. She said she wanted to realize God and give her thought to this and so she will not have sexual relation with him. She wanted to take the window vow of Brahmacherya or Celibacy.

In March 1935 the medical superintendent at Bhowali sanatorium issued a report on Kamla’s condition. Her weight had gone up from 77 to 94 pounds, her pulse down from 120 to100 a minute and her evening temperature had stabilized at 100 degrees.  Her appetite and digestion were both better and her paroxysms of breathlessness had entirely abated. But there was bad news also, ‘The sputum still contain tubercle bacilli and the last X-ray shows a partially collapsed left lung with multiple adhesions in the upper part of the pleural cavity and fluid up to the level of the forth rib in the basal part. The adhesions made it impossible to continue artificial pneumothorax and Kamala was switched to Nordolin treatment and told that if she failed to improve on it, she must go to Europe for surgery. By April she was no better she would have to go abroad Nehru was in prison. Indira was not eager to leave Santiniketan. Where she had been intimate with Frank oberdorf (A German teacher on the staff), but on April 13 while Indira was rehearsing Manipuri dance, when Tagore, informed her that he had received a telegram from Nehru stating that Kamala was worse and must go to Europe as soon as possible . Indira packed and bade farewell to Santiniketan, and took train to Calcutta and then travelling on to Bhowali. At Bhowali Indira found Feroze who told her that he was trying to arrange a way to go Europe with them. Kamala's cousin Dr Madan Atal would go abroad with them.

Nehru went to Bhowali on 15th May to say goodbye to Kamal and Indira . He wrote a detailed medical history for her to take to the surgeon and doctor there. Swarup Rani and Betty Huthseesing who had come to Bhowali to take Kamala home. They left by car for Allahabad.

            Several days later Indira and Kamla went by train to Bombay accompanied by Feroze. In Bombay they visited Gandhi.. on 23 May Kamala, Indira and Dr. Madan Atal sailed for Germany on ' Conte Rosso'. Feroze took the train back to Allahabad, determined to follow then as soon as possible.

On board 'Conte Rosso' most of the first-class berths were occupied by wealthy Indians all who, were suffering from some disease or other  and were going to Vienna to consult doctors there. They landed at Trieste on 3 June . An ambulance whisked Kamala Indira and Dr Madan Atal to the Railway Station and they set off immediately on the wagon-lit for Vienna. Arriving next morning at 9 as they were met at the station by Subhas Chandra Bose - The radical Bengali congressman. who took them to hotel Bristol. On 10th June various Viennaese medical specialist were consulted.

            By mid- June 1935 Indira, Kamala and Madan Atal had left Vienna for Berlin where Kamla had been advised to undergo surgery. On 19th she was operated on by Professor unverricht who cauterized and removed the fibroid adhesions that had formed in her lungs. Madan Atal witnessed the complicated operation and wrote a detailed account of it to Nehru who was fascinated by the advance medical technology and wrote in his prison diary,; an electric bulb (was) introduced though (incision in the chest), thus lighting up the inside-also an eye piece. It was hoped that after removal of the adhesion she would again undergo Artificial pneumothorax which had benefited her at Bhowali. Professor Unverricht referred her to a sanatorium in Badenweiler in Southwest Germany, for another course of 'AP', and just after a week after her surgery Kamala and Madan Atal left Berlin . Indira stayed behind to shop around.

They boarded a train from Vienna for the Badenweiler in the Black Forest, close to both the Swiss and French borders.

The town - a spa with hot spring with curative powers-was scarcely more than a village with a population of about 4000. Evenly divided between permanent resident and invalid visitors. The Romans had built-baths here nearly 2000 years before. In the eighteen century the thermal springs were rediscovered and ever since BadenWeiler had drawn to itself  the ailing, the idle, the wealthy, the famous- and the dying. The American novelist Stephen Crance died in Badenweiler in 1900 and Chekov-one of Kamla's favorite writers- expired here in 1904.

Kamala was admitted in Badenwweiler 's most exclusive sanatorium, the Hans Waldeck under the care of Dr. Steffan, a nurse named Annette and a paid companion a young cheerful German woman named Lousie Geissler. both Kamala and Indira became very fond of Louise and soon Indira shifted to share a room with her at pension Ehrhardt(only disadvantage was they were not allowed to take bath, so Indira used to take bath at her's mothers private bath at sanatorium).

In August Indira wrote to her father Kamala was ' Thin and ...and very weak; mummie is always tired and exhausted because of (her) ..Continuous high temperature and she doesn't talk and hardly listens when anyone else talks. (Despite Kamla's uncommunicativeness and abstraction, Indira went to see her every morning and again every evening. Walking back to her pension at night she could 'feel the trees of Black Forest closing in on her'. There were terrific storms in the middle of the night throughout August with thunder and wind. Which left a permanent fear in Indira for the rest of her life).

In late August Amiya Chakravarty, who was Rabindranath Tagore former secretary and was studying at Balliol College Oxford, happened to come to Germany on a holiday, read about Kamala being at Badenweiler, came to visit her and was shocked to see her condition. He talked to her doctors who told him that her case was hopeless. He also found Indira ' in a piteous state of mind'. sick with worry over her mother. He left for London and their consulted with Agatha Harrison a social worker. They cabled Dr Steffan at Badenweiler and reported that he notify the Viceroy in Delhi of the severity of Kamala's condition. They then wrote an urgent letter to Indian office: Dr Steffan cabled the Viceroy , the secretary of state for India, Lord Zetland and her father. Indira wrote to Agatha Harrison that Kamala is still getting high temperature and is unable to take any nourishment, with the result that she is getting weaker'.

After reading Indira's letter, Agatha wrote to Mahatma Gandhi about her anxieties over Kamala and Indira and  than decided to go to Badenweiler herself to see if she could do anything for them. She found Kamla 'desperately ill and terribly weak' and Indira 'a pathetic figure -though young in years-old beyond  her years in experience in suffering . Agatha was profoundly moved by Indira's odd mix of loneliness and self reliance and the two women - The middle aged, rather humorless English spinster and the shy, anxious teenager- formed an enduring bond.

When Nehru received Dr. Steffan telegram at Almora Jail he wrote in his prison diary, " so this is the end",On 4th September the Government of India released him on compassionate grounds and he immediately began the air journey to Europe; Dehli to Karachi; Baghdad and Cairo, and then a seaplane from Alexandria to Brindisi from where he took a train to Basel. He was met at base by Subhas Chandra Bose and they drove together to Badenweiler arriving in the early hours of 9th September. Just five days after Nehru left Almora Jail , As Nehru wrote to his sister Nan Pandit he was shocked to see Kamala. She had changed for the worse; Kamala now had a bad pleural infection and was running a temperature of 104-5 degrees. She was semi-delirious, nauseated, and scarcely able to take any nourishment. After seeing his  wife, Nehru had a long talk with Dr. Steffan that ' was far from encouraging'.

For more than a month after Nehru's arrived in Badenweiler, Kamala remained acutely ill. In late September her temperature soared to 106 degrees. A Tb specialist was summoned from Frieburg who pronounced ' there was some chance of recovery despite the gravity of the case'.

Every morning Nehru and Indira trudged from the pension Ehrhardt to the sanatorium with a sense of forbodding. Most of the time Kamala was too weak to carry on a conversations Nehru would read Pearl S. Buck's the Good Earth out loud to her and Indira. Then father and daughter went back to their separate rooms in the pension and their separate gloomy thoughts.

In October Kamala suddenly ' took a turn for the better'. not very marked but still cause for relief both Nehru and Indira were worn down by the strain of her illness and with this partial reprieve, they decided to go to London. Shortly after they returned to Badenweiler in late November , Indira went again to school in Bex.

Meanwhile back at sanatorium Kamla's condition deteriorated again alarmingly. Her pleural infection returned and with it a high fever and was agitated and semi-delirius . The doctors removed fluid from her lungs with suction aspiration, but the procedure had little if any effect. Nehru spent most of the day and evening at her bedside.

On 21st December Indira arrived in Badenweiler from Bex to spend Christmas with her parents. She was shocked to find her mother so weak and ill. She wrote to her headmistress back in Bex, that 'mummy ...is almost unconscious, she can hardly recognize anybody and speaks with great pain and it is very difficult for us to understand her as her words are very indistinct, She has not eaten or drunk anything the last two days except for few teaspoons of juice or tea. There is nothing to do but pray.

Nehru and Indira 'ploughed' through 'snow and slush', wondering how many days Kamala had left. To Nehru and probably to Indira , too 'The calm winter scene ' of the the Black Forest with its mantle of snow seemed...like the peace of cold death; Nehru urged Indira to go back to Bex and go Skiing for few days. Indira secretly arranged to meet Frank Oberdorfat at Wengen, a resort in Jungfrau in Switzerland.

She left Badenweiler on 27th December 1935. Two days later Feroze Gandhi turned up unannounced in Badenweiler- to Kamla's and Nehru astonishment. On 31st December 1935 Feroze followed Indira to wengen. At this time Kamla and Nehru discussed Indira's relationship With Feroze. Which Kamala disapproved? In early 1936 Nehru wanted to return to India even Kamla desired to leave Badenweiler and Black Forest- Nehru departed for Paris's and on 31st January Kamla, her nurse Annette and Madden Atal set off in ambulance for the clinique Sylvana in Lausanne (Switzerland) less than an hour away from indira at Bex. Nehru  returned from London to Switzerland on the eve of her and Kamala's twentieth wedding anniversary on 8th February 1936. In London Nehru had learned that he was elected the new President of Congress. Kamala insisted that he should go to India so reluctantly he booked a ticket for 28 February. indira returned on 24th February but by now Kamala seemed to detach herself from those surrounding and barely responded to them.

Kamla's temperature rose even higher she began to hallucinate. On the advice of her doctors Nehru cancelled his flight.

She died at 5am on 28th February. Two days after she died , Kamala was cremated at the Lasagna Crematorium.

On 5th March Indira and Nehru ported -at Montreux Station. Indira boarded the train for Bex alone.

The next day Nehru began the air journey to India with an urn containing Kamla's ashes. Feeling “Our bright dreams were also dead and turn to ashes” When plane touched at Baghdad, he sent a telegram to his publisher of his "AUTOBIOGRAPHY" it was a short cable with the dedication for his book.

'TO KAMLA WHO IS NO MORE.'