Natwar Gandhi, the District's chief financial officer for 13 years under three mayors, recently wrote a memoir about his childhood in India and the opportunities he had after moving to the United States in the 1960s. (Photo courtesy of Arch Street Press)

Ex-CFO Gandhi’s memoir recounts humble origins in dusty Indian village, sings praise for immigrants’ contributions to America

By Edward Cowan On Nov 7, 2019 Last updated Nov 12, 2019

Natwar Gandhi, who became famous locally during 13 years as the chief financial officer of the District, has penned an engaging memoir looking back at his boyhood in India and later adventures — setbacks and successes — in the United States. Titled Still the Promised Land, the book serves in part as Gandhi’s paean in praise of immigrants and his adopted country.

Gandhi, who retired in 2013, still lives in the District, in upper Northwest. He serves on several local boards; consults abroad for the World Bank; takes cruises with his second wife, Panaa Naik (both were widowed); and shuttles with her between Washington and Philadelphia, where she still keeps a home. Nat and Panaa continue to write poetry in their native tongue, Gujarati, the common interest that drew them together. As Gandhi relates, language and literature are his first loves.

Gandhi, shrewdly if a touch defensively, opens his book with the worst day in his 16 years of service to the District: On Nov. 7, 2007, Harriet Walters, a midlevel employee of the tax office Gandhi had headed, was charged with embezzling $50 million of taxpayer money. Walters and 11 others were convicted.

Before that point, Gandhi’s name had conjured only positive associations, with the District’s recovery from bankruptcy in the late 1990s and its return to fiscal sobriety. The Walters embezzlement, though, was a juicy scandal; the media and the DC Council made much of it. How could the multi-year fraud happen? Gandhi recounts that when he became tax commissioner in 1997 at the nadir of the District’s financial crisis, the agency was mired in sloth and low morale. Tax returns lay unopened, checks uncashed. Some of the Walters’ embezzlement had happened on his watch, some earlier. Gandhi had inherited a mess.

At the 2007 press conference announcing Walters’ arrest, Gandhi recalls stepping up to the microphone to deflect criticism from then-Mayor Adrian Fenty, declaring: “If anyone was responsible, it was me. I was in charge of the office.”

When Gandhi offered his resignation to Fenty, the mayor rejected it — he needed Gandhi to keep the District on an even fiscal keel, to prevent Congress from reactivating a financial control board. Later, an outside audit acquitted Gandhi of culpability.

In some ways, Still the Promised Land (Arch Street Press) is the memoir many of us could contemplate writing to teach our grandchildren and eventually their children where the family came from and how it established itself in America. Gandhi’s recollections of his boyhood in India are riveting and unsparing. He was born in 1940, he thinks; he cannot be sure because his parents weren’t sure and no birth certificate was issued in the family’s dusty village, Savarkundla, in the western state of Gujarat. The streets were unpaved. The village had no electricity, no phones, no cars, no indoor plumbing.

Gandhi repeatedly portrays his father, a grocer, as distant and uncommunicative. In later parts of the memoir, Gandhi also indicts himself for neglecting his own children and wife, Nalini, because he was preoccupied — with his studies, with writing his Ph.D. dissertation, with finding and changing jobs, with struggling to make a better living.

Gandhi barely knew Nalini when they married in India; he was 22, and she had not finished high school. For the first two years of their marriage, Nalini had to live with Gandhi’s parents in their distant village as Gandhi worked in Mumbai. As a junior accountant, he slept at his place of work, so scarce and expensive was housing in Mumbai.

Eventually, the couple found a one-room flat — which they could rent only when a friend gave Gandhi the cash for “pughree,” or key money. A theme throughout this memoir is the importance of friends helping friends.

Gandhi escaped to America with the help of another friend from India, who worked at Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta). He reckoned that this historically black school “may not have been at the highest academic level” but the faculty members were far better than the professors he’d had in Mumbai, where he’d studied accounting. He excelled academically, he learned to drive, and he opened his first bank account.

Next, Gandhi taught accounting at a black college in North Carolina, then earned a Ph.D. in accounting at Louisiana State. Then, in a leap to “white America,” he took a teaching slot at University of Pittsburgh. In the Steel City, Nat and Nalini found an extensive Indian community and enjoyed an active social life.

But academia was not for Gandhi, who moved on to Washington and what is now the Government Accountability Office. He worked on tax issues, once briefed Ways & Means Chairman Dan Rostenkowski, and, on a friend’s advice, applied to the District’s first CFO, Tony Williams, for the job of tax commissioner.

When Williams became mayor, Gandhi succeeded him as CFO, serving from 2000 to 2013. The two made headlines as they piloted the District out of its lapse into red-ink budgets and into an era of surpluses. Gandhi joined the Metropolitan Club, cultivated journalists, and became a man about town.

The late Alice M. Rivlin, the Brookings economist who once headed the District’s financial control board, contributed a gracious introduction to Gandhi’s memoir.

The final chapter emphasizes the past and present importance of immigrants to the evolution of the United States, particularly Indian Americans. Reciting their accomplishments, in an apparent jab at President Trump, Gandhi closes his memoir on a note of defiance.

Edward Cowan, a retired New York Times economics correspondent, is a resident of the District. He wrote, pro bono, Reports to DC Voters from 2005 to 2014.