Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra was preparing to attend a friend’s birthday party when a telephone call changed her family’s life forever. It was Priyanka who broke the news of her father Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination to her mother Sonia Gandhi, who held her as she collapsed in grief and struggled to come to terms with the tragedy.In her memoir, Belonging: A Journey of Love, Sonia gives a deeply personal account of how Priyanka, then a teenager, became her source of strength on the night of May 21, 1991. Sonia recalls lying on Rajiv’s side of the bed, reading a book while Priyanka tried on different outfits for a friend’s 21st birthday party.Suddenly, the music from Priyanka’s room stopped, and Sonia heard hurried footsteps approaching. “When the door opened, she entered slowly, her steps deliberate. She seemed to be stilling herself, moving with forced calm as she walked up to me,” Sonia writes.But Priyanka was visibly shaken. “I just got a call. There’s been a bomb explosion. They are saying that twelve people around Papa are dead, but he is okay,” Priyanka told her.Sonia says she struggled to understand what her daughter was saying. “I couldn’t breathe. I stood up, she stepped forward and held me in her arms. I could feel her heart thumping wildly against my chest.”Priyanka then went to check with Rajiv’s personal secretary Vincent George. When she returned, Sonia immediately sensed the worst. “Papa is dead,” Priyanka told her.“I crumpled in my daughter’s arms. ‘I should have gone with him,’ I cried out, again and again. ‘Why didn’t I go with him?’ She said nothing,” Sonia recalls.Desperate for confirmation, Sonia telephoned George herself. “Just tell me, is it true?” she asked.“Yes – it is true, Sahab is no more,” came the reply. Sonia writes that Priyanka sat her down and held her tightly as she cried inconsolably.“My Rajiv was dead. He was gone. I would never see his beautiful face again, I would never feel him holding me, I would never again know the safety of his embrace. I wanted to die. I didn’t want to live without him,” she writes.Sonia also recalls how Priyanka supported her when she learnt about the brutality of the explosion. Remembering Rajiv’s wish to donate his eyes, she approached the family physician, only to be told that nothing remained.“Priyanka took hold of me,” Sonia writes, recalling how the doctor’s response left her struggling to breathe. Rajiv, a former Prime Minister, was assassinated by an LTTE suicide bomber at Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu while campaigning for the Lok Sabha elections.