Thread by @SBengali

Thread: In today's @latimes, a story about @KamalaHarris' grandfather, an upright Brahmin from Tamil Nadu whom she credits (along with her mother and grandmother) with inspiring her career in public service

w/@melmason

latimes.com/politics/story…

P.V. Gopalan was a lifelong Indian civil servant, starting as a stenographer in the final years of British rule and eventually serving in a newly independent Zambia as an expert on refugee resettlement.

Here's a photo from the family. 2/

He and wife Rajam had 4 kids. The eldest, Shyamala, surprised them at 19 with news that she'd been admitted to a master's program at a place called Berkeley.

She'd never left India. In 1958, few Indian women went to study in the U.S.

Gopalan raided their savings. She went. 3/

I thought of my maternal grandfather, born in India in the same decade as Gopalan, who sent 7 daughters to college. The eldest flew to the U.S. a few years after Shyamala, bound for med school in Michigan.

What a trip that must have been. 4/

Most Indian households didn't have phone lines in those days. Gopalan and Shyamala corresponded on pale-blue Aerogrammes that carried news between India & the diaspora, and that every desi kid of a certain age (mine) remembers his parents fishing from the mailbox to open first 5/

Shyamala got into jazz, marched for civil rights, married a Jamaican fellow student, bore daughters named Kamala and Maya, dived into cancer research, got divorced.

Her life couldn't have been more different from her dad's.

She brought the girls to see him every few years. 6/

Through those visits, Gopalan became "one of my favorite people in my world," Harris told us. He taught her to play poker and broke his strict vegetarianism to offer her French toast.

She soaked up his talk of promoting Indian democracy and defeating corruption. 7/

Among Harris' earliest memories is visiting him in Zambia in the late '60s when she was about 5.

The last time he saw her, weeks before his death in 1998, she was about to become assistant DA in San Francisco.

What a life. 8/8

latimes.com/politics/story…