LEAN IN, LADIES!

From fashion to food to spirituality, how Indian are Kamala Harris and Usha Chilukuri Vance?

- ANJULY MATHAI

THE US VICE PRESIDENT and likely presidential candidate Kamala Harris is killing it on the internet! There was a time when the world loved to mock anything Harris-ianfrom her unbridled laugh to her dance moves to her love for venn-diagrams to her hair-care routine (apparently, she spends a lot of time on it while on trips) to her "word salads", when she uses incomprehensible turns of phrase. Today, however, the narrative has turned. What once left people scratching their heads ("What can be, unburdened by what has been") has now been reclaimed by her supporters. They are mining deep meaning from it, whether she meant it or not. Like her line from a speech last year, when she said, "You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?"

Republicans compared it to a daffy talk show while Democrats spliced it into a Taylor Swift track. But Indians immediately knew what she was talking about. It is exactly the kind of thing an Indian mother would tell her children, like Harris's Tamilian mother Shyamala told her and her younger sister, Maya. In fact, everything Indian about Harris is thanks to her mother. After separating from her Jamaican husband, Shyamala raised Harris and her sister mostly on her own in a Berkeley suburb.

"My mother, grandparents, aunts and uncles instilled us with pride in our South Asian roots," Harris writes in her autobiography, The Truths We Hold. "All of my mother's words of affection or frustration came out in her mother tongue-which seems fitting to me, since the purity of those emotions is what I associate with my mother most of all."