On the last day of 1965—two days before leaving for Tashkent—Lal Bahadur Shastri, who had stepped into Jawaharlal Nehru’s oversized shoes only 18 months earlier, neatly eased out T.T. Krishnamachari, finance minister in his cabinet as he had been in Nehru’s. As the news spread, Indira, who regarded ttk a friend and an ally, was not surprised. She was enraged. "I would be the next to be thrown out," she angrily told several people, including me, on that tense night.