ABSTRACT
Business was conducted through an organization known as ‘Burobin’, appointed by the Soviet Government to look after the embassies, which did not reply to urgent letters for weeks on end. But Vijaya Lakshmi, like the rest, found that business had to be created rather than confronted. The Indian Embassy, being new and modestly endowed as befitted a ‘have–not’ country, had a staff of only seventeen members which included everybody—diplomats, non-diplomats, and domestic workers. Mahatma Gandhi had been assassinated in January 1948, killed by a Hindu fanatic for seeking reconciliation with the Muslims, who mourned him as one of themselves. When Vijaya Lakshmi heard the news, she grieved less for the unique exponent of non-violence, now immortalized by martyrdom, than for her brother. Lonely always on his solitary eminence, Jawaharlal, with Kamala and Ranjit dead, his daughter absorbed by her two small sons, and herself so far away, was now alone indeed.
