A Marwari Girl

Chanda Zaveri left for the US to escape the marriage that her parents had arranged for her. 

Chanda Zaveri, a Kolkata based girl from a conservative Marwari business family, caught a flight to Boston in 1984 to escape the marriage that her parents had arranged for her. While in the United States, she cleaned petri dishes to finance her masters in molecular biology and genetics from the University of California at Santa Barbara and a graduation degree later from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Mentored by the two-time Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling, Chanda, 49, is now a successful entrepreneur and a dollar millionaire. As the founder president of the California headquartered Actiogen Corporation, she expects to notch up $100 million in turnover by selling a newly developed acne patch.

During her annual winter visit to Kolkata, Chanda remembers how she bought a British Airways ticket to Boston by selling off her diamond earrings. Only two classmates from Kolkata's City College, from where she graduated with biology, knew about her escape plans. She was in touch with Dave and Karen, whom she had met in 1982 in Kolkata and arranged for medical treatment when Karen suffered from a heat stroke.

Sponsors Dave and Karen, who turned up in Indian clothes to receive her at the airport, made sure Chanda felt at home. They offered her emotional support by sleeping on her either side during the initial days. A strict vegetarian, Chanda remembers that she threw up when she was taken to a seafood restaurant the evening after her arrival. "Dave and Karen jumped up when I woke up in the morning and said 'We are going to prepare a vegetarian sandwich for Chanda'."

"To comfort me, Dave used to read the Bible every night," remembers a misty-eyed Chanda.

After living under their care for a while, Chanda was adopted as a foster daughter by Karen's California based parents, Gerald and Marilyn Foglesong.

Always protective about Chanda, foster mother Marilyn once suggested that she cancel a Mexico trip proposal by an academic she used to visit and even accompanied him on a short boat ride in California. Marilyn called up the academic and cautioned, "You will be emotionally hurt. Chanda is not the type you think she is."

"The academic refused to meet me ever," Chandra said, laughing.

While babysitting in California, Chanda was once abused by the male parent. When she threatened to call the police, he backed off. Chanda called Gerald who picked her up, but not before giving a dressing down to the baby's father.

Chanda, who was used to a house full of servants in Kolkata, is grateful to her foster parents for making her independent after she started earning: "To my surprise, I was told to move out. Gerald said, 'You have to live alone and we have found a house, which you and your mother, Marilyn, will decorate'." Later, they explained that Chanda was becoming too dependent on them and it would be difficult for her if they were no more since they were both aged.

In 1990 she barged into the 90-year-old Linus Pauling's Caltech laboratory to ask, "Sir, I have a 4.0 GPA with straight 'A's. What does it take for a student to work in your lab?" The Nobel Laureate laughed and said that the student had to possess dark hair and dark skin and had to marry him. She answered back, "When?" She started by cleaning petri dishes at the laboratory, and went on to work under him for four years.

Under Pauling's tutelage, Chanda learnt how Vitamin C, the essential nutrient for humans, could be a panacea for cancer and also effectively slow down the ageing process. Pauling taught Chanda how to work with herbs to prepare drugs, a method followed by shamans and medicine men in ancient civilisations and how to balance peptides with human body receptors for curing diseases.

In 1994, the year Pauling died, Chanda used a peptide base for cosmetics and sold it through Geneda Corporation, a company she floated with some investors, who were influenced by her speech at a seminar organised by the Society for Cosmetic Chemists, New York.

The money she made from Geneda and from TV shows was multiplied trough real estate investments.

Branching out on her own in 1998, Chanda floated Activor, which was closed down in 2008 due to employee problems. Soon after that Chanda LLC, Actiogen and Angiomead Corporations were floated in successive years to make and market skincare, hair care, nature care and anti-ageing products. With her latest acne patch, Acne Dot, Chanda is into direct marketing and retailing across the globe.

Chanda said, "I am researching on protein disorders and sequencing to identify diseases and their causes. It can become a diagnostic tool for the future."

Did she miss her biological parents during those years?

Tears welling up in her eyes, Chanda said, "The price of freedom was very painful. I never thought I would meet my family again during the flight to Boston. I cried all the way."

Without her knowledge, her foster parents regularly communicated with her biological parents in India and kept them apprised about her whereabouts. Her foster parents hugged her biological parents like long lost family members when they visited Kolkata with Chanda for the first time after she left home.

How did she reconcile with her biological parents? "My father concluded that I was different from the other three siblings, a sister and two younger brothers."

When asked about a message for girls who are still being forced into marriage at an early age, the Hindi medium school educated Chanda said, "I wanted to set a precedent and have learnt that you have to be strong to help others.

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