Ratan Tata and a romance interrupted: A quiet, graceful love story

Carolyn Jones, whom Ratan Tata hoped to marry, before the 1962 India-China war altered their lives, passed away on January 18

On Sunday last, Carolyn Jones, born Carolyn Emmons, passed on in San Francisco after battling cancer. She was 83, and the wife Ratan Tata never had. 

In August 1962, Ratan, 25, had returned to Mumbai to be with the ailing Lady Navajbai Tata, his adoptive grandmother and “guiding light”. But he had seriously contemplated returning to Los Angeles to spend his life with Carolyn and fulfil his heart’s desire to be an architect in the city famous for its welcoming weather. 

Carolyn was the attractive, elegant, 19-year-old daughter of Frederick Emmons, the partner at the firm that gave Ratan his first job. Standing 165 cm tall, she sported a bouffant hairstyle, worn by the elite of the society, including Jacqueline Kennedy. It made her look taller and a match for the six-foot-plus Ratan. 

I had interviewed her at her home in San Francisco for Ratan’s biography. As Ratan had by then revealed how much they were in love, I took with me some specially made Kashmiri stoles as a gift to her. She accepted them with distinct grace. 

It was a day-long, nothing-held-back interview, paused only when she served me the lunch she had cooked. She recalled her first meeting with Ratan and confessed that, as she peered into his hazel eyes, she kind of blanked out. It was the beginning of a rapturous and intense relationship that came tantalisingly close to marriage. 

Ratan did not wait to ask a yearning Carolyn out. It was not “fancy dates”, she recalled, as he neither had enough money nor a car. But that mattered little to them. She belonged to an affluent family, and the couple used her Volkswagen Karmann Ghia coupe for their dates. 

Marriage was on their minds, and on Saturdays, they inspected cars with the dealers in Beverly Hills, like soon-to-be-married couples. Carolyn’s favourite was the French Facel Vega, which they planned to buy to go on long drives after their marriage. 

He had also become the darling of her parents. Her mother “thought it was the most wonderful thing" that could happen to Carolyn. For her parents, Ratan was already family, and they even put him in charge of their house and their pet cat when they went on holiday. It was a modern house of glass and steel, which her father’s partnership firm had made famous. But it spooked Ratan, who feared ghosts, as it reflected images when the room was dimly lit. It left him scared to “death” when he went to feed the cat, recalled Carolyn. 

Ratan usually spent his weekends with Carolyn, listening to songs of Edith Piaf, the French chanteuse. She added that her parents had, however, forbidden them from staying over at each other's place. But with a twinkle in her eyes, she added: “He got around things like that, you know.” 

When he returned to India to be with his grandmother, they decided she would soon follow. 

But in October 1962, the Sino-Indian war broke out. Coming not long after the Korean War, for an American, India looked like an unsafe country. Reluctantly, a heartbroken Carolyn abandoned her plans to join Ratan. 

It was a decision she would later come to rue, especially as her parents would have supported her going to India. She said, “I do regret not going. I never gave it a chance… I really wish I had."  

“He was perfect. I had my whole life sort of planned. I thought it was going to be the most wonderful life." 

The distance drifted her apart. She ended up marrying Owen Jones, who she said "was very much like Ratan,” an architect and a flier. But her father said that she married on the rebound. 

Carolyn’s marriage broke Ratan’s heart. He was jealous and was keen to marry her if she were unhappy. Four years after he had last seen her, Ratan took her and her husband out to dinner. She was then expecting her second child. Yet she was "excited to see him," she recalled. 

“You seem to be happily married, so I decided then and there never to contact you again," Carolyn quoted Ratan, who told her this several years later. 

But the embers of their love defied death. She confessed that even two decades after they parted, when she learned that Ratan was still a bachelor, it made her “insides happy", though she admitted that it was a "selfish and horrible” thought to have. 

Owen died at 70, in 2006. Carolyn was 66, and a grandmother. With her family settled, a chance viewing of the 2007 Hollywood comedy-drama, The Darjeeling Limited, triggered an avalanche of memories of Ratan. She sent him an email informing him that she wanted to meet him. Instant came the reply: "If you're coming, I'd love to see you, have dinner." 

She spent nearly five weeks in India, during which they met several times. The first meeting was at Taj Mansingh in Delhi. "I was so nervous, he gave me a big hug, and it was just…," she recalled. 

Since then, during his visits to the US, he invariably flew to the West Coast to spend time with her. He recalled to me: "I usually go and have dinner with her. I usually take one evening, sort of reserve, to have dinner with her." Carolyn, on her part, visited Ratan regularly and stayed at his home, Halekai, in Colaba, Mumbai, especially on his birthdays. 

When I met her, she also surprised me by handing me two of her favourite photos of Ratan that she had preserved for nearly 56 years for use in the book. She said that she had hidden them in her personal almirah.  

I also kept in touch with her, and whenever I visited the US, I never forgot to bring her Kashmiri stoles, which she had become fond of. 

That was, however, not my last gift to her. She asked me for two copies of the biography of Ratan that I had written, which I sent with a personal note. Her son wrote to me, saying the book "thrilled my mother and our whole family” and that "it truly captures what a remarkable man Ratan Tata was and how much he meant to a nation". 

But the union that was not to be got India a business leader with few equals, and the Tata group, a chairman who made the “Tata” name more famous across the world, rekindling Indian pride by acquiring marquee symbols of western dominance.

Now that Carolyn has passed on, perhaps those who believe in the afterlife may wish that the union sought on earth would become a reality in heaven, with a waiting Ratan having made the journey first.

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The writer is the author of Ratan Tata: A Life, published by HarperCollins in 2024