Ms Harris visited Chennai with her sister Maya after their mother died and immersed her ashes in the sea in keeping with Hindu traditions, according to this report in The Hindu newspaper, external . Ms Harris comes from a family of high achievers. Her maternal uncle Gopalan Balachandran is an academic. Her grandfather PV Gopalan rose to become an Indian bureaucrat and was an expert on refugee resettlement. He also served as an advisor to Zambia’s first president in the 1960s.
