A STONE image of Lord Ganesha greets you as you drive into Mr Sat Pal Khattar's Balinese style house off Tanglin Road. It is one of the nearly 20 Ganesha images that can be found at his marvellous home - a structure which owes a lot to the lady of the house, Mrs Reeta Khattar, and has been featured in a design magazine.

An artist, she was closely involved in the design along with the architect. She is also a tower of strength for her husband. She is a director in all his companies but confesses that she does not involve herself in the day-to-day affairs, a job she leaves in the safe hands of her husband.

As for Mr Khattar, he needs no introduction to those in the legal and business communities in Singapore. He is the founder of Khattar Wong & Partners, one of the largest law firms here, and the chairman of Khattar Holdings, a private investment firm.

Mr Khattar does not practise law anymore. These days his mind is occupied with facts and figures of the business kind. Earlier this month, he was awarded the Sicci-DBS Singapore-India Business Award for helping to foster Singapore-India business and investment.

What drew him into investments?

"India opening up its economy in the 1990s was a big catalyst. It was a desire to do something for myself. As a lawyer, you are doing everything for others. After some time I kept saying, 'I could do so many things for myself' and so I started making investments when we had the means and slowly it grew and grew till it became big enough to do it full time," he says.

Khattar Holdings is purely a family investment business. "We had two houses behind Shangri-la Hotel and we got attractive offers that gave us the wherewithal to go into investments. So we have been investing since then,:" he adds.

Mr Khattar was born in Bhera, a small town near Sargodha, in the north-eastern part of what is now Pakistan. His father came to Singapore in the 1930s and, after working for others, set up a small sports goods shop. Tragedy struck when he returned to Sargodha on a holiday. The senior Khattar had taken his family to visit his sister in another village when communal riots following Partition looked likely to break out. Feeling it was not safe for him and his family to remain in their hometown, he rushed to fetch his mother, leaving his son and daughter in his sister's care. Before he could return, the family had to flee. They ended up in a refugee camp in Ambala, on the Indian side.

The senior Khattar, a widower then, walked for several days with his mother stopping at different places. After three months they reached Ambala and by some good fortune he learnt that his family was also in the same town. It was a joyous reunion but the family's problems were far from over.

The business in Singapore was shut down by the Japanese. So the father left his family in Delhi and returned to Singapore to restart his business.

"One-and-a-half years later, he brought us here. We came by a ship called Sangola from Kolkata and it took eight days," recalls Mr Khattar who went to Raffles Institution for his Senior Cambridge.

His father remarried and the family lived in the Orchard Road area. "Growing up was fun. We used to live in Orchard Road when the area had lots of orchards. Those days it was not a prime real estate area. The place where Takashimaya is located used to be a burial site. Paragon, Liat Towers and International Building sit on areas which used to be orchards," says Mr Khattar of his younger days.

The transition from boy to man was quick. When he was 20 and doing his second year in law, his father died. The burden of supporting his sister, stepmother, grandmother and three stepsiblings fell on him. It was tough managing the business and completing his course.

"Law was almost an accident. I was not supposed to go to university. My father had allowed me to do law on the condition that I would spend the whole day in the shop. I did law because no other faculty was prepared to accept me. Those days law was a new faculty and very few people wanted to do law. Lawyers were not held in high esteem by the Chinese community,:" he recalls.

He married Reeta when he was 27 and she 21. A Punjabi like him, she hailed from Penang and was working in Kuala Lumpur when he was introduced to her by a relative. The poetry-loving Khattar wooed her with his love poems, some of which she still treasures. They have three children.

Eldest daughter Shareen, 39, is married to an investment banker and runs the Marmalade group which operates seven restaurants here. Second son Navin, 32, is a solicitor practising in the UK. He is married to an English woman. The youngest, Arvind, 31, graduated from the London School of Economics and helps dad in his investment business.

So what is his advice to Singapore businessmen who want to do business in India?

"Doing business in India is not easy. So long as you accept that India is not Singapore and you are prepared to be persistent, then things will work out. Things don't happen quickly as they do in Singapore. You can easily become frustrated," says the man who has no regrets about investing in India as his investments have done well.

Persistence is one word which appeared more than once during our conversation. It is also the reason why Mr Khattar keeps himself so trim and fit.

He does breathing exercises in the morning and spends time on the treadmill five times a week in the evening...not so easy for a man who is turning 67 in a few days. But he persists and the result is there for all to see.