A classically trained singer and practising Hindu, Shyamala graduated from the University of Delhi at the amazingly young age of 19, to then go and earn a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, where she met Kamala’s father, Donald. After their divorce, she would become a leading cancer specialist.

The brilliance and chutzpah required of any woman to achieve such things is exceptional, let alone one from the impoverished and tradition-bound India of the 1960s, where even affluent families like Shyamala’s could rarely own basic goods like a fridge or television set.

Westerners mistakenly think of Indian women as the doormat products of a patriarchal society; in truth, they are the resolute backbone of a rising India, and of the remarkable success of its émigrés around the world. Behind every high-achieving Indian – be it the British Chancellor Rishi Sunak, Republican Party star Nikki Haley or Google CEO Sundar Pichai – you will find a mother who inspired, supported and, when required, berated and guilt-tripped her offspring to reach their potential.

While Harris’s stellar single-generation ascent may seem unusual, it is the norm for Indians in the US, where the community is now the most educated and highest earning in the country – thanks to its mothers.

My CV doesn’t compare with Harris’s but, like her, whatever I’ve achieved owes much to my mother’s dogged belief and assistance.

For her part, my mother, Surinder Kaur Sidhu, was born in 1952, and was among the first girls to receive any education in her rural Punjabi village; the last of ten children my grandmother bore, half of whom she’d already seen die. Without electricity or running water, survival there required a harsh daily toil.

Nonetheless, my mother dreamed of becoming a teacher while doing well at school, which, for much of her childhood, consisted of taking down lessons on a wooden slat, washed between classes, while sat under a tree. A brick structure in which to study, but without chairs and desks, only arrived towards the end of her schooldays.

The poverty and simplicity of that world is impossible for me to imagine. Every day she woke at dawn to chop fodder and tend buffaloes before going to school. She wouldn’t see a film until, aged 16, she went to a cinema that was a two-hour bus-ride away with her girlfriends.

When state-funded schooling began after independence, my grandfather was adamant that she would be educated, not illiterate like he and his wife. Britain had left its former colony with a literacy rate well below 20 per cent, and almost zero among women. But he died when my mother was only 15, and my grandmother, panicking for the future, took my mother out of school at 17, wanting to prepare her for marriage instead. She rebelled in the only way possible – demanding to be married to someone abroad, where she might have more freedom.

That would happen in London, in 1973, with my father, then a squaddie with the Gloucestershire Regiment. It hasn’t been the escape she hoped for. My father struggled terribly throughout their still-ongoing marriage with issues including addiction, mental illness, cancer and insolvency. She would raise her four children effectively on her own while helping him survive his troubles.

Arriving here without a qualification, speaking no English and receiving no outside support, she managed to hold her family together and push her children – through inducement, encouragement, hysterical brow-beatings and guilt-inducing weeping fits – to make something of themselves. However broke our household was, she always found money to pay for books, school-trips, tuition and anything else our educations required. I eventually became a writer, my brother an accountant in the City, and my sisters a social worker and an English teacher.

Our mother’s unwavering commitment to her family has been a cause of both awe and shame, as I, like most Indians, think of how much she sacrificed, and what more I should have done to make her proud. Driven by that same angst, “What would Amma think?” has been Kamala’s constant question throughout life (‘amma’ being the word for mum in her mother’s native Tamil).