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"You were born soon after the Partition of India. How did that affect you and your family?"

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"I'm from India. I see it as a place of 28 states, 28 languages, 28 cuisines, 28 kinds of music, and 28 kinds of outfits: there's so much diversity, so when you travel 500 miles, everything changes. It's not like the U.S. where there's one main language and culture. Growing up in a cosmopolitan place like Mumbai, I was more tolerant of other religions and other people's beliefs and cultures."

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This is Nana's 70th birthday cake: a depiction of her current interests.

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"My passion is music. I started playing the veena when I was seven; I took a natural interest in the instrument and wanted to learn to play it, so my mom taught me. To this day, I still remember all the notes and melodies. Now, I'm into crocheting and knitting. I crochet and knit clothing and donate it."

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"I got up at 6 in the morning, and school would start at 9, so I'd leave at 8:30. I'd come back home at around 5 in the evening, and dinner would be ready for me. I did all my homework, and my dad would tell me a bedtime story, and then I'd go to sleep. My dad was working at the Oxford University Press [a publishing company], so some days he'd come home with a new book, and I'd finish it the very next day."

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A drawing of some of the different languages Nana learned as a kid: on the left are English and Marathi, while Hindi and Tulu are on the right. All of the speech bubbles contain greeting words in each of these languages.

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"My first language was English. My second language was Hindi, and my third language was Marathi. After I got married, my mother-in-law taught me tamil. I was able to speak five languages fluently when I was young thanks for my neighbors. They spoke different languages, so I learned from them. At one point [as a kid], I knew English, Hindi, Marathi, Kannada, and Tulu."

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"My dad was a dog lover, and at one point, we had seven dogs at home. It's because my dad had a friend who was a vet, and he'd hear about these dogs that were being abandoned, so my dad would constantly say 'Okay, I'll take it home,' and because of that, the number of dogs kept growing. We were living on the third floor of a building, and we had maids to take them outside for walks. Because of all of this, I also started loving dogs."

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"Yeah, and that allowed my kids to also love dogs. I had a dog named Rani--he was a German shepherd. When I had my first child, he was very possessive over her--he wouldn’t let anyone touch the baby; people were scared of him, so they wouldn’t go close to the baby. I also had Neetu and Julie; they were adorable labradors. They lived until they were around 13 or 14 years old, and then I had another dog, a German shepherd, that we named Leo. He was a very, very ferocious dog--like the nightmare of the whole town where I lived."

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A snippet from the newspaper featuring a picture Nana playing her veena. The article is written in Tamil.

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Weren't you in the newspaper for the veena?

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Weren't you in the newspaper for the veena?

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"Yeah, there was an article about me in the newspaper. It talked about my music, and how I played the instrument. By the time I was 12 years old, I could give good performances. Also, my mom gave performances on the All India Radio. We didn't have televisions at the time; otherwise she would've been on there too."

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Another one of Nana's passions is cooking and baking.

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Nana helping me get ready for a Bharatanatyam (Indian classical dance) performance.

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Nana holding my older brother as a baby.

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"It is not our differences that divide us. It's our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences." - Audre Lorde

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"It is not our differences that divide us. It's our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences." - Audre Lorde