Manhattan Masala

Zohran Mamdani is fond of reminding the world that he "exists" because his mother had travelled to Uganda to shoot Mississippi Masala.

- AMITAVA SANYAL

The masala packed in that tiny sachet of information gives a taste of the broth Zohran—now the Democratic nominee to be the mayor of New York—was cooked in.

The mother, Mira Nair, is a Punjabi born in Rourkela who studied literature and visual arts at Delhi and Harvard universities. In an aside that speaks to her feistiness, Nair claims that while playing Cleopatra at St Stephen's College, she ate onions to keep Shashi Tharoor's Antony at a distance. In Kampala to shoot her second film, Nair met Mahmood Mamdani, a Gujarati-origin, Uganda-born scholar who had come back to research his Harvard PhD thesis. The rest is the rolling history of an immigrant family.

Born in Kampala and given the middle name Kwame after Ghana's first president, Zohran moved to New York just after hitting his school years when Mahmood got a teaching job at Columbia University. In the US, Zohran first attended a posh Manhattan private school before passing through a Bronx public school and graduating in 'Africana studies' from Bowdoin, a liberal arts college.