MOHUA DAS
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| Chanda Zaveri at her Salt Lake home, which she visits in winter every year. Pictures by Sayantan Ghosh |
A
Calcutta girl who fled marriage at 17 is back home three decades later
as a millionaire American entrepreneur with a master’s in molecular
biology and a Nobel laureate as mentor on her CV.
Chanda
Zaveri’s extraordinary story would have been just another dream dashed
had she stepped out of her Kankurgachhi home in a trousseau back in 1984
rather than sneak out to a life of challenges.
So determined
was Chanda, now 49, not to end up like “most Marwari girls of my age”
that she chose to trust a tourist couple whom she had met on Park Street
instead of family members who thought marriage was best for her.
A
teenaged Chanda soon landed in the US with the American couple’s
support, worked as a maid, impressed her employer enough to get a study
sponsorship and then walked into a lab at Caltech one day to tell
two-time Nobel winner Linus Pauling that she would work under him!
In town this winter, like she is every year, Chanda narrates to Metro her believe-it-or-not
journey from Calcutta to California and how a penniless girl founded
the skincare products company Activor Corp (now Actiogen) and devised a
formula that is also used in one of Calcutta-based Emami’s bestselling
creams.
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| Chanda Zaveri shows a picture of her with foster father G. Foglesong on her cell phone |
I
come from a conservative joint Marwari family living in Kankurgachhi. I
did my schooling at Balika Shiksha Sadan on Vivekananda Road and I was
very young when I completed school, only 14. Then I went to City
College, where I majored in biology. Marwaris then wanted their girls to
get married soon and not go to college. But I was very influenced by
the culture of education in Bengal; so I wanted to study.
My parents
arranged my wedding and I ran away! I had no money, just a pair of
diamond earrings. I sold it, got myself tickets on British Airways and
landed in Boston.
I used to
frequent the American Library on Park Street and hang around at YMCA.
One day, an American woman fell unconscious on the road from heat stroke
and I helped take her to the doctor. We became good friends.
So
two years later in 1984, when my parents tried to get me married off, I
called Karen and David who were back in Boston by then. In those days,
there was no email or fax but just a noisy telephone line. I called
David’s office and he, after 10 minutes of struggling to figure out who I
was, agreed to send me a sponsor letter.
When I went to
the American consulate for my visa, the visa officer looked at me and
said: “You look so young, you cannot go the US.” I was upset and told
him: “Do you think America is heaven? That anybody who goes there will
never come back?” He looked at me and said: “Okay, I am giving you a
five-year multiple entry visa, I was just kidding!”
Landing penniless
I
remember crying all the way to Boston. I was happy that I had got my
freedom but I was also so attached to Calcutta. The airport had taken
away all my Indian money, so I didn’t have a penny to even make a phone
call. But my friends David and Karen turned up to receive me. In Indian
clothes!
Thus began my
journey. I didn’t have a work visa, so I looked up the newspaper and
found an old lady looking for a help. The very day after I joined her,
she passed away. I called her son living in Hawaii who asked me to call
the mortuary. I wondered what a mortuary was! I had never heard of that
word! I was scared to death.
Coming from a
well-off Marwari family, you have your servants doing everything and I
had never worked. But to go to school, I had to do it.
After a few days, I
found another lady, Mrs Leslie, 98 years old, who took me in as her
help. One day, she asked me to make lamb chops for lunch! I am a
vegetarian, I had never even had an egg in my life and here she was
asking me to make lamb chops, that too “medium”. I didn’t even know what
that meant! And I burnt the entire thing.
When
she realised I didn’t know how to cook, she asked me to look up the
yellow pages for a restaurant. I didn’t know what yellow pages meant! It
was one culture shock after another, every day. But she started
enjoying teaching me their way of life. She was lonesome, without a
child and I became her daughter who she started raising instead of me
helping her. She gave me $30,000 one day and said: “I want you to go to
Harvard.”
Soon after I
had completed the two units that I needed to pursue my masters in the
US, David introduced me to his father-in-law, who adopted me as his
daughter and brought me to California.
My
American parents once came and stayed with my biological parents for
six weeks. They explained to them that America doesn’t mean MTV or
Saturday nights and that I had gone there to study. They accepted and it
was no longer a big deal.
I joined the
California Institute of Technology, where I did my research in
biochemistry under Linus Pauling, who was a visiting professor there.
That’s how I learnt how to make peptide. (Pauling won the Nobel prize
for chemistry in 1954 and for peace in 1962, the only person to win the
Nobel twice without sharing the prize with anyone.)
Cleaning petri dishes
I
worked for four years with Pauling till he died in 1994. It’s a funny
story how I met him. He was 90 years old then, sitting in the laboratory
with a cap on, when I went up to him and said: “Sir, I have a 4.0 GPA
with straight ‘A’s. What does it take for a student to work in your
lab?”
He
looked up and said: “Well, one has to have dark skin, dark hair and
marry me!” So I asked him: “When?” He started laughing. He told me that
he didn’t have much work there but needed someone to clean the petri
dishes. So I told him: “I will clean the petri dishes. I would just be
happy to be around you.”
I
would go in the evenings after the students had left and clean the
petri dishes and write down what I could see. When he found me keenly
observing and writing, he told me: “I want you to be learning about
peptides because I am not going to be in this world for too long.” He
really gave me hands-on lessons on how to make peptides and a lot of
formulations we did together.
If
you ask me about my goal, when I was young, it was to win the Nobel!
But when I saw elderly people, their wounds and bed sores, how they
don’t heal, I thought I could try and do something to heal wounds.
The
first peptide that I made is the B2 Actigen, which improves collagen in
the skin. While studying and dealing with radioactive particles, I got
very sick. I was 22, my skin got dragged out and I was looking very bad.
So I thought, “What if I can create that collagen and put it in a
cream.” That got a huge reaction and it started selling.
When
at Caltech, we had done some work on rust inhibitor and I had helped
with the patent that the university got. My professor gave me $70,000
and since I was the inventor, they gave me a green card. I had enough
money to start my own company, which I called Activor and I was the
first one to start using peptide in cosmetics. Emami’s Fair &
Handsome has my peptide in it too. I have independently formulated skin
lightening, anti-ageing and sunscreen products for Estee Lauder and
Revlon.
Eyeing $100 million
Now
my company is called Actiogen, based in Los Angeles. We create
scientific peptide-based skincare products on anti-ageing, acne,
cleansers, toners, day and night creams, sunscreens and stretch-mark
removers. They are functional cosmetics, which aren’t just feel-good and
smell-good. We sell online and through info-commercials. In fact, I
have just got the FDA approval for an acne patch that we are launching
soon. We are hoping for a $100 million turnover with this new product. I
also want to bring these acne patches to India.
There
are things you do for survival but I am on a path. Like, today, we find
DNA and gene sequencing. My goal is to one day sequence all the
proteins so we would know exactly where one gets sick because of a
protein disorder at a very basic level.
I
love Calcutta, keep coming back every year and I built my own house in
Salt Lake. I am happy to see more Marwari girls pursuing higher studies,
but the priority of finding a good groom still remains. Having gone
through that and having worked as a maid, I hope for a day in India when
people, irrespective of their status and gender, will treat each other
as equal.
I
think I had a destiny that I asked for. I believe in the law of
attraction. If you want something and you don’t have ifs or buts, you
will get it. No matter what.
What is your message for Chanda? Tell ttmetro@abpmail.com
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