I was born in 1944 in Jamshedpur, in the state of Bihar in the North East of India, the third child and the only daughter in the family. It was one of the major steel towns and my father, a Chemistry Honours graduate, was a metallurgist. That was in the years before independence, in the middle of the war and towards the end of English rule. One of the first things I remember is the Hindu-Muslim war. I remember the tension in the house. We were Hindus but my father had a close friend who was a Bengali Muslim. They worked together at the steel plant and there were problems there, and so he hid his friend. I remember that Baba (father in Bengali) was really worried about him and worried about us too, because we were his family and if anybody found out … My parents were very cosmopolitan and did not believe that religion or difference should separate people. That may be an important factor in my own story too.

I was born an albino and I think that this was the first ‘problem’ in the family. They had never come across it before and did not know anybody else with that condition. I had no one to relate to. I never met anybody who was like me, although later in my teens people told me that there were others in Calcutta. I think my parents were very positive though. My grandfather had been chief medical officer and my uncle was a doctor.