Soradini with her husband P.A. Sangma at their Tura residence. A Telegraph picture

Tura, March 2: She has seen many an election but is unlikely to forget the one to be held tomorrow in a hurry.

Torn between three men, she has had a tough time all these days; not being in the pink of health did not help matters.

Meet Soradini Kongkal Sangma, wife of Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader Purno Agitok Sangma and mother of two other candidates — Conrad and James.

This is for the first time all three male members of the family are contesting the elections.

“There has been a three-fold increase in Madam Sangma’s workload. Her presence at rallies while campaigning for her sons, even if fleeting, helped connect with voters of the three constituencies,” a party worker said.

“She suffered a mild stroke last year and gets tired very easily,” her daughter Agatha, a lawyer working with a law firm in Delhi, said.

It was showing when the lady, in her fifties, returned to her hilltop residence on the outskirts of Tura town from a four-hour campaign in Selsella the other day — tired but smiling, attending to the stream of visitors and well-wishers who had gathered there.

She admits it has been difficult — using her experience of being in public life as the wife of a politician who has not only won since 1977 but was a former Union minister and later Lok Sabha Speaker — to cope with the hurly burly of electoral politics of the hills where one-to-one contact is a must to connect with the voters.

“Difficult, but what to do? I had to devote more time to my sons’ constituencies as people want to see me. But most of the time I was at home attending to the well-wishers,” she says softly, somewhat relaxed now that campaigning is over.

While Sangma the senior has returned to state politics after 1988, the couple’s eldest son James makes his debut and the youngest Conrad wants to be second time lucky.

“I know the family since my student days. Madam Sangma is a popular figure who is known to voters for her down-to-earth nature, accessibility and strong background. She is the daughter of a laskar (zamindar). She is a simple member of the party,” said Bibhas Das, a senior office-bearer of the NCP’s West Garo Hills district unit.

When asked how difficult it was for her to campaign for the three men, she said: “Quite difficult. This is an Assembly election. I was used to parliamentary elections where the issues are different.”

“With three men close to me contesting the polls, managing funds and time was really difficult,” Soradini, the chairperson of Sangma and Sangma group, said.

The most difficult part, she recalls, was explaining the reason behind her husband’s return to state politics. “Now he wants to devote time to the people of the state,” the home science graduate and mother of four says.