Success has many parents. So it’s not surprising that the presence of two Indian-origin women in the US presidential race has sent some Indians scrambling to plot their nth degrees of separation from them. Both women trace their roots back to high-achieving families from south India. Both were born to immigrant parents in California and studied law.
But that’s where the similarities end between the 59-year-old vice president and presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala Devi Harris and 38-year-old Usha Chilukuri Vance, wife of the Republican vice presidential pick JD Vance.
Kamala’s Chennai-born mother, Shyamala Gopalan, then a PhD candidate in endocrinology who used to love singing along to Aretha Franklin records, met her father, Donald Harris, a jazz-loving, Jamaica-born development economist, at a protest meet. Their involvement in the civil rights movement and Shyamala’s conviction on women’s rights set Kamala’s political compass in her early years spent between Oakland and Berkeley.
Kamala gets another attribute from Shyamala—laughing from the belly, something that has been tutted at. That laughter and keeping a bunch of old friends close is what has allowed her to brave her battles, says the veep.
Kamala’s memoir, The Truths We Hold: An American Journey, begins with a groan of disbelief from her husband Doug Emhoff on the “long, dark night” of November 2016, it became clear Donald Trump would be president.
It explains why this race is personal for her and goes back to trace her journey from being an intern at a county court, up to being the top public prosecutor in California and then a senator.
The book is peppered with browns—being a brown-skin woman, browning beef cubes, brown lawns, and even former California governor Jerry Brown, whom she succeeded as the state’s attorney general. But one Brown who played a not-so-insignificant role in her early career is missing—her former paramour Willie Jr, San Francisco’s first black mayor who as state assembly speaker appointed her to two commissions.
In a 2019 op-ed article titled ‘Sure, I dated Kamala Harris. So what?’, Willie, 30 years Kamala’s senior, wrote that the difference between her and the other politicians he had backed is that “Harris is the only one who, after I helped her, sent word that I would be indicted if I ‘so much as jaywalked’ while she was DA. That’s politics for ya.” Where Willie saw a jutting elbow, others could see an upright spine.
On the other hand, Usha’s most intimate sketches come from her husband James’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. He was a self-professed bumpkin from a small, post-industrial Ohio town trying to fit into Ivy League poshness at Yale Law School, where the “bright, hardworking, tall and beautiful” Usha became his “spirit guide” who had to teach him even fork-and-spoon etiquette. The bluntness of her feedback set her apart in the eyes of a “heartsick” James, who ditched conventions to confess his love after their first date.
When James would withdraw into a shell, Usha would call him a "turtle.” When he would scream and break up, she would make him see reason. When he once stormed out of a hotel after a fight, she sat crying on the steps of Ford’s Theatre, where John Wilkes Booth had shot Abraham Lincoln.
When he first visited Usha’s family, James was “amazed at the lack of drama”; instead of cribbing behind others’ backs, which he had been used to seeing, there was empathy. Chilukuri Radhakrishna, an aeronautical engineer, and his wife Lakshmi, a molecular biologist, had moved their Andhra roots to the US in 1980. Lakshmi taught at a Catholic university in San Diego, where Usha grew up.
Amy Chua, law professor and author who popularised the term ‘tiger mom’, knew of James’s soaring ambition and advised the couple to do clerkships together. But not all the opportunities came in twos: Usha, the brighter student, got to clerk for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, whom Kamala char-grilled at his senate confirmation hearing.
The rest is history in the making. As Kamala and Usha put their brown skin in the bruising game of politics, a line from the song ‘500 miles’—also the rough distance between San Diego and Oakland—seems to be propelling their trajectories in Washington: “Can’t go back home the ole way.”