I was born into a large joint family in Calcutta. My grandfather along with his six brothers and two sisters had migrated from outside Dhaka to Calcutta well before the partition, leaving behind large tracts of land there. My father who was barely in his teens, when he had to leave the ancestral home forever, would often tell us about lush green villages, the rivers in spate and an elephant and his mahout that the family had left behind.
My grandfather was a compulsive serial entrepreneur. He started a multitude of businesses, starting from lizard skin, bone dust, and even a regional air service that connected Chittagong and Dhaka. His crowning glory was India Cycles, the country’s first cycle factory in Calcutta, well before the Munjals started Hero Cycles. His entrepreneurial chutzpah created enormous wealth and influence for our family in the vibrant city of Calcutta. He bought a sprawling bungalow from an Englishman so that the entire family could live under one roof. It had some of the best Burmese teak furniture money could buy. The garage was choc-a-bloc with foreign cars like Buick, Packard, Humber Hawk and Austin.(This story appears in the 22 October, 2010 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)