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At the hospital, the Prime Minister's body was taken to the eighth-floor operating theater. There, despite the lack of any vital signs, a team of twelve doctors desperately tried to perform a miracle. After putting her on an artificial lung and a heart machine, they removed seven bullets; in the process, they gave her 88 bottles of type O Rh-negative blood. Cabinet ministers waited in the hospital conference room, some stunned and speechless, some weeping. "They could not believe she was dead," a young doctor said later. "They would not accept that she was gone." It was not until 1:45 p.m. that an Indian news service sent the bulletin: MRS. GANDHI IS DEAD.
It was typical of the proud, stubborn, courageous Indira Gandhi that she hated to wear a bulletproof vest and rarely agreed to do so. Certainly she was a fatalist. The night before her death, she had told a large, enthusiastic crowd in Orissa's capital city, Bhubaneswar, "I am not interested in a long life. I am not afraid of these things. I don't mind if my life goes in the service of this nation. If I die today, every drop of my blood will invigorate the nation."
For two days after her death, her body lay in state at the Teen Murti House, the great mansion that had been Jawaharlal Nehru's residence during his years in power, while hundreds of thousands of her countrymen came to pay their respects. Early Saturday afternoon, her body was carried seven miles in a gun carriage to the banks of the Yamuna River, an area where Mahatma Gandhi as well as her father and her younger son Sanjay had also been cremated. A million Indians had lined the streets to see the procession, and millions more watched on television as her body was placed on a flower-covered pyre of sandalwood and brick, and set afire by her son Rajiv.