Aged four-and-a-quarter, Patel was playing in the garden around the bungalow when Gandhi was gunned down. The first thing she recalls after the sound of gunshots was the sudden flutter of birds as they rose to the sky in fear.
Though Patel was too young to understand what was going on, she remembers the chaos and confusion outside her house the evening Gandhi was killed. There was much commotion in her driveway, and a mad scramble on the road outside. She couldn't see her father around at the time and remembers being pulled into the house by her mother.
Much of that day was a blur. The next thing Patel knew (on what must presumably have been the following day), a man in uniform picked her and put her onto an army truck as Gandhi's funeral procession passed by her house, giving her a ringside view of one of the darkest moments of Indian history. Pandemonium is the word she uses to describe the scene at the time
This is the first time she has shared her story with the media. Gandhi's assassination remains a traumatic childhood memory for her, one that marked Patel's first encounter with death. "This was the first incident in my life where I was witness to such utter chaos. It was very traumatic for me. I knew that somebody had died and a funeral procession was going past my house. My father had the habit of explaining things to me at an early age, so I knew who Gandhi was," says Patel.
Looking back, she can now see just how intricately her childhood was bound to the early years of India's Independence. Saturday afternoons, for instance, were spent playing in Jawaharlal Nehru's house. As principal private secretary to the first Prime Minister, her father, HVR Iengar, was called to work on Saturdays, but protested as that was the day he promised he'd spend with his daughter. Nehru, known for his love of children, asked Iengar to bring his little girl along. Patel recalls Nehru picking her up, propping her on the banister at the top of the stairs in his house and watching her slide down at full speed.
Many years later, as an adult, Patel understood the significance of Nehru and Gandhi for India, something she was a tad too small to know when, at the age of four, she saw a funeral procession pass by her door.
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