NEW DELHI _ For a girl from Berkeley, about 5 years old, the setting must have been intoxicating: a bungalow surrounded by greenery in a newly independent African capital, where children ran outside to wave at the president's car as he drove past.
This was where a young Kamala Harris spent time in the late 1960s, at a house in Lusaka, Zambia, that belonged to her maternal grandfather, an Indian civil servant on assignment in an era of postcolonial ferment.
The Indian government had dispatched P.V. Gopalan to help Zambia manage an influx of refugees from Rhodesia _ the former name of Zimbabwe _ which had just declared independence from Britain. It was the capstone of a four-decade career that began when Gopalan joined government service fresh out of college in the 1930s, in the final years of British rule in India.
It was also the start of a relationship that would define Harris' life. Until his death in 1998, Gopalan remained from thousands of miles away a pen pal and guiding influence _ accomplished, civic-minded, doting, playful _ who helped kindle Harris' interest in public service.
"My grandfather was really one of my favorite people in my world," Harris, California's junior U.S. senator, said in a recent interview.
As she campaigns for the Democratic presidential nomination, Harris often invokes her late mother, Shyamala, a diminutive and dauntless breast cancer researcher who taught Kamala and her younger sister, Maya, to strive for excellence and lift others up.
These were principles Shyamala inherited from Gopalan and her mother, Rajam. In 1958, she surprised them by applying for a master's program at the University of California, Berkeley, a campus they had never heard of.
She was 19, the eldest of their four children, and had never set foot outside India. Her parents dug into Gopalan's retirement savings to pay her tuition and living costs for the first year.
"It was a big deal," said Harris' uncle G. Balachandran, a 79-year-old academic in New Delhi. "At that time, the number of unmarried Indian women who had gone to the States for graduate studies _ it was probably in the low double digits. But my father was quite open. He said, 'If you get admission, you go.'"
It sounds today like a classic immigrant tale, but Harris' grandparents' broad-minded values were uncommon for the India of that time. That family legacy doesn't shine through in Harris' speeches on the campaign trail, where she has struggled to break into the top tier. She seldom delves into her Indian heritage, reflecting a broader reticence to share personal stories beyond a handful of well-worn anecdotes.
"Shyamala was quite definitely influenced by my father, and she in turn had a great influence on Kamala," Balachandran said in a lengthy conversation in his home, a modest, semidetached apartment his father built on land he was given upon retirement. Much of the family's story was related by Balachandran and his daughter. Other family members declined to be interviewed.
Gopalan was a Brahmin, part of a privileged elite in Hinduism's ancient caste hierarchy. In post-independence India, convention destined Brahmin offspring for arranged marriages and comfortable careers in academia, government service or the priesthood _ if they were men. Women were not expected to work at all.
All four of his children bucked convention in their own ways.
Balachandran, who earned a Ph.D. in economics and computer science from the University of Wisconsin and enjoyed a distinguished academic career in India, married a Mexican woman and had a daughter. His younger sister Sarala, a retired obstetrician who lives outside the coastal city of Chennai, never married. The youngest, Mahalakshmi, an information scientist who worked for the government in Ontario, Canada, had an arranged marriage but bore no children.
"Not one of them was traditional," said Harris, who grew close to her aunts and uncle during extended visits to India as a girl.
"When you're raised in a family, I guess later in life you realize how your family might be different," she said. "But it all seemed very normal to me. ... I obviously did realize as an adult, and as I got older, that they were extremely progressive."
