Although Sonia Gandhi’s upcoming memoirs will throw greater light on the crests and troughs Congress Party’s first family encountered, parts of the private lives of the Gandhis were previously revealed in another telling book.Titled ‘My Years with Rajiv’, the book by retired bureaucrat Wajahat Habibullah recounts how Rajiv Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi first met. A former Director in the Indira Gandhi-led Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), Habibullah was a family friend of the Gandhis and was a year junior to Rajiv at Doon School, where, he says, Rajiv had very few friends.“These friends included Vikram Narain, an Army officer’s son; Vivek Bharat Ram, scion of a leading business family; Ravi Ghai from the family that owned the very successful restaurant chain Kwality; Sumendu Banerjee whose father was a senior IFS officer; Sanjiv Mukherjee, son of Subroto Mukherjee, India’s first Air Force chief and Ravi Katari, son of the admiral heading the Indian Navy,” Habibullah writes.He also draws a contrast between the personalities of Rajiv and his brother Sanjay Gandhi, describing the latter as more outgoing and fond of pranks. “Sanjay was more gregarious and adept at playing pranks…Ever the prankster, Sanjay had riled the Doon School management by repeatedly breaking bounds without a trace of remorse. Headmaster Martyn had to ask Sanjay’s mother Indira Gandhi to please take him away. Sanjay then left for school in Delhi,” he writes.About the Rajiv-Sonia meeting, Habibullah tells an interesting story. He recalls in the book that while Rajiv, following in his grandfather Jawaharlal Nehru’s footsteps, enrolled at Trinity College, Cambridge, before leaving to pursue his interest in engineering at Imperial College, London.“In February 1968, Rajiv got married to Sonia, the daughter of an Italian businessman Stafeno Maino. He met Sonia, who was studying in England, at Varsity, a Greek restaurant in Cambridge. Sanjay, as I knew him, had something of a roving eye, stories of the liberality of both their (Sanjay and Rajiv’s) parents and of their grandfather, in dispensing their favours are legend. Rajiv was straight-laced. When he loved, it would be forever,” Habibullah writes.He also recounts what Sonia told him while grieving Rajiv’s assassination on May 21, 1991.“As our eyes met for the first time, I could feel my heart pounding. We greeted each other and as far as I was concerned, it was love at first sight. It was for him too, he later told me,” she said.For much of his life before Indira Gandhi’s assassination brought him to the centre of national politics, Rajiv led a quiet life with Sonia and their children, Rahul, born in 1970, and Priyanka, born in 1972, at his mother’s home.Habibullah writes that he often met Rajiv and Sonia at the residence of Mohammad Yunus, then Chief of Protocol in the Ministry of External Affairs, who lived at a well maintained 11 Willingdon Crescent road residence.Yunus’ son Adil Shahryar was a close friend of Rajiv who later faced accusations that as Prime Minister, Rajiv let Union Carbide Corporation CEO Warren Anderson escape from India as a quid pro quo to secure an early release of Shahryar from an American prison.“Adil was an outstanding student at the American International School in Delhi until he fractured his skull in a motorcycle accident, from which he never fully recovered. Having moved to the US, at his mother’s urging, … Adil in his damaged mental state was exploited by a gang of Cuban criminals in Miami which resulted in him being convicted of serious crimes after a full trial before a jury in 1982. Adil was released under orders of US President Ronald Reagan on June 11, 1985, the day PM Rajiv Gandhi arrived in Washington DC for a state visit,” Habibullah writes.The Bhopal gas leak occurred in 1984 on the night of December 2-3. Anderson escaped and left India on December 7 that year.