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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
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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.
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