[5] Subsequently, she was raised by an abusive father, an ex-serviceman and driver and her step-mother, with whom she travelled from Kashmir to Murshidabad and finally to Durgapur, West Bengal, where she grew up.
Now as a single parent, she started working as a housemaid in New Delhi homes, to support and educate her children, sons Subodh and Tapas and daughter, Piya; and then encountered several exploitative employers.
[2][7] Her last employer was writer and retired anthropology professor Prabodh Kumar, a grandson of noted Hindi literary giant Munshi Premchand, living in Gurgaon, a suburb of capital New Delhi.
[8][9][10] After several months, when her memoir was completed, Kumar also aided in editing the manuscript, and shared it with local literary circles and translated it into Hindi.
It received media attention as it documented the hard lives led by domestic servants in Asia,[10][11] and within two years it had published two more editions.