Sunetra: There was so much actual weight behind what he said. It was saying: you need to make a decision right now. You need to take charge of your destiny. And I am telling you how you can do that.

Alex: Sunetra Gupta has always loved animals.

Sunetra: When I was a child, I moved around a lot. So we didn't have pets. And I remember trying to sort of keep a fly in a matchbox at one point just because I was so desperate to have a pet.

Alex: Then, when she was 16, Sunetra was given a pet rabbit. He lived for 12 years

Sunetra: which is, you’ve got to admit, a very senior age for a rabbit.

Alex: When Sunetra left her home in Kolkata to go to university, her father was tasked with looking after the rabbit.

Sunetra: In effect, the rabbit became my father's pet. My father and I had a very strong bond always but, it augmented that bond in very interesting ways. And my father became very attached to the rabbit.

Alex: Her father, Dhruba, would write letters to Suneta … from the rabbit.

Sunetra: He also wrote them in French

Alex: That’s right – – Sunetra would get French letters,, from her pet rabbit while she was at university. Naturally, the rabbit would update her on all the family gossip and pass comments on global affairs.

Dhruba would fold the paper into quarters – he’d write the top few lines, her mother would write the second part, and her grandmother would write the third.

Sunetra: And then the fourth bit when you folded over was from the rabbit in French, and it was just wonderful.

Alex: Sunetra’s beloved father Dhruba had a playful streak – – mischievous even.

Sunetra: As he got older, he started to look young for his age because he had a very youthful expression always and a real twinkle in his eyes. I thought he was very handsome. He had very beautiful eyes. Very expressive. He was completely bald. He started to lose his hair in his mid-20s.

Alex: Dhruba was a renaissance man of sorts …

Sunetra: …he was a Bengali renaissance man.

Alex: He loved cinema, and theatre, and books.

Sunetra: He was a great entertainer. He… he was an extraordinary person, I mean he taught African history at the university of Calcutta.

Alex: He founded the Film Society of Calcutta back in the 50s.

Sunetra: He was a great adventurer. He absolutely loved to travel.

Alex: Most of all, Sunetra remembers her father as someone with a beautiful voice, who loved to sing.

Sunetra: He was an excellent singer. He sang all the time. His singing was sort of the music in my life and has always been the music in my life

Alex: When she was a child, Sunetra woke up to the sound of her father singing most days. His voice would mingle with the soundscape of the warm Kolkata morning: hawkers selling coconuts, birds warbling, the hum of nearby water pumps.

Sunetra loved the buzz of the city.

Sunetra: It's full of these beautiful old colonial buildings and hustle and bustle of life, and is also the centre of the most vibrant kind of intellectual activity and real internationalism.

Alex: Sunetra’s father made sure to immerse her in this community of lively debate and discussion.

Sunetra: We talked all the time and he initiated me into the whole art of thinking just by sitting around the dinner table and just challenging me in conversations. It was a discourse. It was always let's talk. You're a valid other person, let's talk, you're young, you're a child, let's still have a conversation.

Alex: When Dhruba was going out to meet his friends, he would often invite Sunetra along.

Sunetra: And this is from the age of 11, or 12 – He'd say, Hey, would you like to come along, I'm going to meet up with my friends in, you know, either one of their houses or sat in a restaurant.

Alex: The men would drink their beers, Sunetra would sip on a lemonade. And they’d all talk – mostly about films and music.

Sunetra: When I spoke, all these men who were then in their, whatever 40s 50s would just listen to me. Everyone was accorded respect in their opinion.

Alex: In 1979, Sunetra was 14. She was doing really well at school. Her grades were excellent. But something didn’t feel right.

Sunetra: I was attending a very posh, exclusive school, which I found to be… not really… didn't suit me, I felt I was more interested in integrating with the Bengali culture, this school was much more … catered to a privileged class. There's nothing academically wrong, I just don't like this, I want something else for myself.

Alex: Sunetra was feeling conflicted. She decided to raise the issue with her father.

Sunetra: We were walking back from the Calcutta Book Fair and I said I wasn't really happy with my situation at school. And he said, Well, in that case, you should leave. He said, Well, if you're not happy there, then you must leave. And you should go to a different school. He had a great dignity in how he spoke

Alex: Dhruba’s words were simple enough – – but Sunetra could read between the lines.

Sunetra: It was imbued with a sense of purpose. There was so much actual weight behind what he said. It was saying: you need to make a decision right now, Madam, you're 14 years old. And you need to take charge of your destiny. And I am telling you how you can do that.

Alex: Sunetra took Dhruba’s advice, and took the admissions test for a new school, an experimental one. The gamble paid off: she loved the school and spent four happy years there.

Alex: Sunetra went on to study biology. After she got her PhD on the transmission of infectious diseases, she went out for a celebration drink with her father.

Sunetra: My PhD supervisor said to him, oh, you must be very proud. My father said, why? It’s just a PhD. He never said I'm proud of you. In fact, that was something he actively did not like to say.

Alex: The way Dhruba saw it, a PhD isn’t an end in itself.

Sunetra: It's good. It might help you in your goals. But your real goals are to achieve happiness, fulfilment, and to be able to care for others and to be able to do something that makes you feel like you’ve achieved your purpose in life. And that's not something anyone can endorse externally.

Alex: Most people crave the approval of their parents. Things were different between Sunetra and Dhruba.

Sunetra: I didn't need him to say, I love you. I knew that so well, so deeply inside. And I didn't need him to say I'm proud of you. I’ve just never needed him to be proud of me. It was almost …the understanding between us was so clear and close. It wasn't about being … he didn't ask me to achieve anything. He just wanted to enable me to be who I wanted to be.

Alex: Sunetra went on to become an award-winning epidemiologist and professor in the department of zoology at Oxford University. She researches how infectious diseases like malaria, flu and COVID are transmitted, and is focused on developing a new flu vaccine.

It’s clear that Dhruba’s influence can be felt in Sunetra’s two daughters, Olivia and Isolda.

Sunetra: Of course, we've had very, two very difficult years. And they've really shown to me what they're made of in these two years.

Alex: Pre-pandemic, her older daughter had been training as a corporate lawyer.

Sunetra: But decided instead to take up a much lower paying job in order to public law and human rights and that's very inspiring to me and I know that's exactly what my father would have liked.

Alex: She now works as an immigration lawyer.

Sunetra: It really arose from within her. It makes me believe that people… you know, that we are good. That we tend towards being good. And if all things are equal, we do not move towards positions of greed.

Alex: Doing what you feel in your heart to be right – not because of the trappings or how it looks on the outside – that’s the legacy of Dhruba Gupta. One of them, anyway.

Sunetra: One of the things I took from my father was very much that an unexamined life was not worth living, and also, that you have to stand up for what you believe in. And I think that that's the central thread. You have to stand up for what you believe in. And, and you have to endure the costs of that.

Alex: Sunetra has been active in calling out the harms of lockdown during the pandemic. She’s one of the founders of Collateral Global, a charity which documents the effects of covid policies.

Sunetra: And it was this incredible loss, and I had to kind of deal with that loss. And I had young children at the time. And, you know, how do you put all that together? And I think the way I put it together at that point was just by thinking, I was so lucky to have this person as a parent. And at the time, you know, when I needed him, and now I don't have him anymore, but I've not lost anything. Those memories are permanent.

Dhruba passed away in 2004 at the age of 69.

Alex: Sunetra will often still listen to her father singing in the mornings – she has plenty of recordings of his songs.

Sunetra: I just feel incredibly lucky. I just… it makes me feel blessed. It just simply makes me feel so extraordinarily lucky to have had that person in my life.

Alex: Listening to Sunetra talking about the relationship she had with her father is a heartwarming experience. It appears to have been characterised by mutual love and respect that was felt and didn’t need to be said. Parents are so often focused on the achievements of their children. But Dhruba wanted something more profound for his daughter: happiness and self-actualisation. Giving Sunetra the space to be the person she wanted to become has obviously helped her to achieve success in life. But, most importantly, success on her own terms. This is something which she has passed on to her daughters. She has been supportive of the choices they have made and has allowed them the same freedom she was afforded. Ultimately, by being such an influential role model, Dhruba has created a role model in Sunetra.