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interest in seeing that his son was well settled. “It is all right, my boy,” he wrote to Jawaharlal as early as 1907 on the subject. “You may leave your future happiness in my hands and rest assured that to secure that is the one object of my ambition.”
    The Nehrus launched an extensive search within the Kashmiri Pandit community before settling on Kamala Kaul, the daughter of a flour-mill owner. When the decision was made Jawaharlal had not yet returned to India and Kamala herself was barely thirteen. Needless to say, they had never met. She spoke not a word of English, having been educated in Hindi and Urdu, and had none of the graces required for the Westernized society Jawaharlal frequented, so Motilal arranged for her to be groomed for his son by Nan’s and Betty’s English governesses. Three years of “finishing” later, on the auspicious day of Vasant Panchami, which marks the first full moon of spring, and which fell that year (1916) on February 8, Jawaharlal Nehru, twenty-six, married Kamala Kaul, ten years his junior. It was, at least in one crucial respect, a match made in heaven: Jawaharlal’s mother had insisted on comparing the astrological charts of the young couple, which a pundit she trusted assured her were compatible.
    For Allahabad high society, the wedding was the grandest event of 1916 — but it took place in Delhi. Motilal rented an entire train to transport family and friends to the new capital city of India (a status Delhi had acquired, at Calcutta’s expense, in 1911), where a “Nehru marriage camp” was set up in style. The celebrations lasted a week in Delhi and were repeated in an endless round of parties, concerts, and poetry recitals in honor of the young couple when they came back to Allahabad.
    Jawaharlal left Kamala behind when he went trekking and hunting with friends in Kashmir that summer and had his second narrow escape from an untimely death. Exhausted by almost twelve hours of continuous mountain climbing, and seeking to cross an ice field, Jawaharlal stepped on a pile of fresh snow: “it gave way and down I went into a huge and yawning crevasse…. But the rope held and I clutched to [ sic ] the side of the crevasse and was pulled out.”
    Jawaharlal Nehru had not been saved for a life of mediocre lawyering and relentless socializing. Three years after his return to India, he was bored by both pursuits. Politics began to command more and more of his attention. For several years, the Indian National Congress had been run by the Moderates, who contented themselves with the ritual adoption of resolutions exhorting their British rulers to do better by India. While this kind of politics did not enthuse Jawaharlal, neither was he greatly inspired by the Extremists, who had split from the party and established Home Rule Leagues around the country seeking self-government for India within the Empire. But the Extremist leader Annie Besant had been an old family friend, having helped initiate him as a thirteen-year-old into theosophy. So Jawaharlal joined her Home Rule League and made his first public speech on June 20, 1916 in Mrs. Besant’s defense and in protest of the Press Act, 1 under which she had been prosecuted. It was a modest performance, with no immediate consequences. Father and son attended the Lucknow Congress of 1916, where a historic Hindu-Muslim pact was concluded between the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League, a party of Muslim notables that had been established in 1905 to advance Muslim interests (though several leading Congressmen, including three of the party’s presidents to date, were themselves Muslim). But Jawaharlal did not speak at the Congress, remaining on the margins of that great (and sadly to prove evanescent) triumph of Hindu-Muslim political cooperation.
    His father, however, was emerging as a major figure in the party. Motilal was named by the Congress to draft, together with a