What the book does do is take the reader on an interesting, carefully choreographed, walk through the major landmarks that littered Indira Gandhi’s adult life. It talks about the near-perfect relationship Nehru had with Vijayalaxmi Pandit, juxtaposed with the fractured one he had with Kamala, his wife and Indira’s mother. Small wonder then that Indira had a polite, gracious and ‘cold’ response to her cousins and their mother. Family ‘rivalry’, even if latent, can have a devastating impact on a child who feels unanchored and alone, particularly when all around her are endless cousins and their brothers and sisters. In that context, one would have liked the author to have delved deeper into the fragile and complex psyche of a young Indira, struggling to feel comfortable in her ‘social’ space, that other writers dealing with the same subject would have found difficult to do. Those personal contortions are glossed over and not assessed in the context of her private life or her political avatar.