Born to Indian parents, Usha grew up in California’s San Diego. Her mother, Lakshmi Chilukuri, is a marine molecular biologist and biochemist and provost at University of California San Diego, while her father is an engineer. Usha studied history at Yale and Cambridge before returning to Yale to become a lawyer. She won prestigious clerkships including with the current US Supreme Court chief justice John Roberts.

Usha then worked as a litigator at Munger, Tolles & Olson, a law firm in San Francisco, where, according to a now deleted bio on the firm’s site, her expertise included “complex litigation and appeals in a wide variety of sectors, including higher education, local government, entertainment, and technology, including semiconductors”. She resigned from the firm on Monday soon after Vance was picked as Trump’s running mate “to focus on caring for her family”.

While Usha’s story and achievements compare with many other Indian-Americans who go to top schools and do well professionally, her life will now be entirely different than any other member of the diaspora.

And that’s because Usha met Vance at Yale Law School. Writing about her in his celebrated book, Hillbilly Elegy, Vance noted that as he was thinking about his own identity, he “fell hard” for a classmate who, incidentally, was also assigned as his partner in a writing assignment.

“She seemed some sort of genetic anomaly, a combination of every positive quality a human being should have: bright, hardworking, tall, and beautiful…she had a great sense of humour and an extraordinarily direct way of speaking,” Vance wrote. At the end of their first year, the two started dating. Vance said that after a “few weeks of flirtation and a single date”, he had told her he loved her, violating every rule of dating he had learnt.

Vance called Usha his Yale “spirit guide” in the book, encouraging him to seek opportunities that he didn’t know existed and ask questions that he didn’t know how to ask. Their relationship deepened, they clerked together in northern Kentucky, and Usha helped Vance overcame what he candidly writes were his struggles with emotional intelligence, expressiveness, and explosions after a traumatic childhood. Usha’s Indian family also gave Vance a new perspective, and a set of relationships that he had lacked growing up. Looking back at his first visit to her family for thanksgiving, Vance recounted being surprised with the genuine warmth and connections he witnessed.

Acknowledging her in the book, Vance wrote that Usha had “read every single word of my manuscript literally dozens of times, offered needed feedback (even when I didn’t want it!), supported me when I felt like quitting, and celebrated with me during times of progress. So much of the credit for both this book and the happy life I lead belongs to her.”

Usha, according to media reports, was a registered Democrat till 2014, but shifted to being a registered Republican in 2018, a period that coincided with Vance’s own political embrace of Donald Trump brand of conservatism.

Vance has also said, at different moments, that Usha, a Hindu, also helped him find his Christian faith, a personal but also political assertion in a Republican Party where religious conservatives constitute a powerful stream. Usha will become the first Hindu spouse of an American vice president if Vance is elected. The Vance-Usha love story that began with friendship in a Yale classroom may take them to Washington DC, in yet another demonstration of how deeply Indians have got integrated in American society and political life.