by KRISHNAN SHARMA
The author of ‘Both/And: A Life in Many Worlds’ was Hillary Clinton’s aide. Her father is from India and mother, from Pakistan.
Fourteen years ago in 2007, the New York Daily Observer ran an exposé on an unknown 32-year-old political aide that spilled over with encomiums of an extreme usually reserved for the likes of Beyoncé or Madonna.
She was “mysterious, glamorous and eerily unflappable”, gushed the newspaper, “a mythical figure.” This was the very public debut of Huma Abedin, the closest personal aide to Hillary Clinton, the woman who would become the very first serious female candidate for US President.
Immediately after the “unauthorised” Observer piece, she was profiled by Vogue as “Hillary’s Secret Weapon”, again with as much attention paid to her looks as her competence: “[she] has had three hours of sleep and four cups of coffee, but her black Prada suit is wrinkle-free, her skin is flawless, and her long, luxurious hair is blow-dried into the kind of bouncy waves you see mostly in shampoo commercials.”
The intervening years have not been nearly as breathlessly positive. Abedin served her famously pioneering boss when Clinton was Barack Obama’s Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013, and then became vice-chair of her 2016 campaign for President of the United States.
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