She was briefly married and was divorced, after which she moved to Calcutta where she was wooed by a succession of men, allegedly rejecting an Indian Army Officer because of "the Punjabi accent" of his spoken English.
She ultimately remarried a tea-plantation owner of Tibetan origin and moved to an estate high above Darjeeling in the embattled north-eastern state of Assam.
[citation needed] She ran a hotel there and authored three novels: Daughters of the House, Cranes' Morning (1993) and Hold My Hand, I'm Dying, the last being published posthumously[1] after her suicide.
Soon after its publication, it became clear that her second novel, Cranes' Morning, had been plagiarised from The Rosemary Tree by the English novelist Elizabeth Goudge, which had been published in London by Hodder & Stoughton in 1956.
Molly Moore of the Washington Post Foreign Service wrote: "Aikath-Gyaltsen recast the setting to an Indian village, changing the names and switching the religion to Hindu but often keeping the story word-for-word the same".