A deep sorrow filled my spirit when Elizabeth Warren dropped out of the Democratic primary. A feeling of almost beens, near haves, what ifs. A severe lack of imagination.  I feel a wretchedness of whether it will ever be. A forbidding sense of improbability, an impossibility.

I cannot help but remember.

Spring 1972. I am ten years old. We are living in New Delhi in India. Big signs, small signs everywhere. A colorful symbol of a cow is the widespread political signage of the Congress Party. I hear shouts in Hindi: Garibi Hatao. Garibi Hatao.Garibi Hatao. “Remove Poverty”. It is election time.

From the balcony near the hallway with our two bathrooms, one with the squat down latrine toilet and the other with the rationed one bucket a day of water per person, the crowd gathering near us roars, moving like a fast river towards some invisible magnet. It is dusk.  Big, electric lights shine brightly in the huge park nearby.

I slip out of our middle-class upstairs apartment flat in the government complex in Netaji Nagar, not telling my mother where I am going. As I skip down the stairs, Amma shouts at me, “Don’t go towards the political rally. We don’t know what kind of people will be there. It is not safe to be outside in the streets right now. Your father is on the other side of the world. Don’t put this responsibility on me.” I stop, turn around and look back at her with pointed desires. She beseeches me, her eyes stern as I have ever seen them. But I knew I could outrun her.

I grin at her in apology, nod, face the shouting streets, not slowing down. Moved by something larger than myself,  I head to the streets, brimming over with heady excitement. People all around me, shouting in pleasure and joy. The running crowd is mostly men.

Suddenly, I feel my younger sister’s six year old self tucked as close as she dare inside my body, and I realize that she has followed me. Her look says, “I don’t want to miss this adventure.” I am angry at her, my eyes flashing daggers, my voice yelling: “You are too young to come with me. You saw Amma doesn’t want me to go. I am ten years old. Much older than you. No question–––you cannot come with me.” Her eyes are stubborn, insisting. For a moment, my fear rises in my throat like a rough cloth being pulled out of it. But maybe thinking that her being with me will give me some protection, in this sea of men, I nod, and give in. .

We move quickly to join the heaving crowds running swiftly towards some irresistible force, holding fast to each others’ hands. We can’t see over the adults. We are carried by them, almost like a light wind.

The next moment, my sister and I lose our footing. As I fall down below the crowd, I am thinking: How can there be a hole in the ground? What is going on? Then, I recognize it. It is an air raid trench left over from the war with Pakistan a few months before. They were dug all over New Delhi. We are tumbling, feet flying past above us. This is the end of us. Amma was right. We should never have gone out. We should be home, safe. Our heads hit the bottom of the trench; we struggle to get up, fearful of entering such a roaring crowd above us. They do  not see us and would never stop for us.

Two Sikh men in colorful turbans, tall and strong, scoop us up, one of us in each of their hands, and lift us up high in front of their eyes and shout at us, not in an unfriendly manner, “Go home little girls. Away. You don’t belong here. This is too dangerous for you both. Go home.” As they set us down, filled with gratitude, we tremulously say, “thank you, thank you, you saved our lives.” They shout at us, “Go home.” Their white salwaar cloths swing by us and they fly away.

I shout at my sister, “Go home.”

“Are you going home?”

“No,” I shout back.

“Well, I’m not either.”

The public excitement is too much for us. We dash along with the crowd, trying to keep track of the open trenches.  This time we skip over them along with the crowd. I feel as if we are soaring.

Finally, we get pretty close, maybe a hundred yards from the center. There she stands, in her simple printed silk sari, her sharp, regal nose fixed on what seems to me a beautiful, powerful face. After all, she is the daughter of Nehru, the founder of India, the first prime minister. The crowd loves her, as do we. Her voice is booming all around us. Standing on rickety painted steel stairs, she looks as if she is floating above the crowd.

“We must remove poverty.” she says in Hindi. “That is the most important thing we can do together…. remove Poverty. We must remove poverty.”

The crowd has found their leader. Men love and adore her. Her voice is booming with her megaphone. I look around in amazement. I knew she was a great politician. That is why I wanted to see her. The fact that she is a woman doesn’t seem to be a striking negative characteristic to the men around us. She is treated almost as if she is a man, though she is dressed in a sari. It is her raw intelligence, her dancing eyes filled with humor, her unbending confidence.

A few months before, she had become the Prime Minister of India. She was Indira Gandhi, a woman, a widow even, who in that misogynistic  Indian culture were often treated by some castes as “untouchables”. India did not seem to make a big deal of it. She was Nehru’s daughter.   That fact overruled everything else. That was why she had won the election.

Three years later, Indira Gandhi acted as a prime minister in ways deeply autocratic and undemocratic. She declared The Emergency, an act of dictatorship I was revolted by.  As a fourteen-year-old, I wrote my first political piece against the Emergency for my high school newspaper in rural Maryland, calling out for a resistance to her draconian measures.

Elizabeth Warren was a far better candidate than Indira could ever be.  Indira was born into a high level of privilege, and then though a widow, she was the prime minister’s daughter, hobnobbing with the world’s leaders, helping her father co-host his diplomatic duties. Her situation was akin in America to the daughter or wife of any President having a real fighting chance to be our President.

But for us right now, even being the daughter or wife of a Kennedy, a Clinton, or an Obama, doesn’t seem to enable us as a democratic nation to imagine actually electing a woman president as our primary leader, as it has been possible for so many other countries, including India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan. In America, the very fact of gender seems to trump hyper-competence, talent, and leadership gifts to the possibility of becoming the President of the United States.

I am not saying that it is the complete solution to have a woman at the helm, but to not be able to imagine any woman as a leader is a shame we must carry around with us as Americans, until we don’t have to anymore.

Sadness, grief, anger. I cannot quite describe the mourning that took me over on Tuesday, March 3. The sudden demise of Elizabeth Warren’s candidacy, her abrupt loss of presence in the presidential nomination has been devastating. I know I have to accept it. There is no other choice. After decades of hearing that India, the country of my birth, has been labeled as an “underdeveloped” country, I can only suggest we conclude that America is “underdeveloped” in terms of its imagination of gender.

I imagine a near future where we can easily elect a woman leader as a President, without concern for her gender, or her appearance, or her quality of voice, her “electability” not in question.

I imagine a future where our imagination of a leader includes the vision of the common good, where the sense of the “I” is in proportional balance to the sense of the “We,” necessary whether we face global climate chaos or global pandemics. Or both.

That we have this remarkable young 17-year-old girl, who has been calling the world to her, to say in her clear, powerful way that the “house is on fire,” that our world as our home is on fire.

In another way entirely, our human bodies are extremely vulnerable to this new, invisible virus. A different kind of fire, of the body, of breath, of the lungs.

What has been astounding to see over the past few days is the speed of our collective responses, to save the vulnerable ones, to shut society down. Maybe this is how we need to conceive of how we deal with both the pandemic and the climate, at the same time. To re-imagine it all anew. As Greta says, “No One Is Too Small To Make A Difference.”  Let us take this opportunity to Reimagine it all. To Reimagine a Leader, to Reimagine another kind of world.