She is an alumnus of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi and completed her MA in English literature in 1994.

One of her short articles published in The Hindu has been included in the NCERT English textbook with permission.

[citation needed] To share the spirit of Kabir, Jaya, along with her two sisters, performed Akath Kahani,[16][17][18][19][20][14][21] a unique immersive song-spoken word-dance presentation that won rave reviews.

[22] Jaya ran a very popular weekly humour column called "Loony Life" for The New Indian Express[23][24][25][26][27][28] which enjoyed a huge readership.

Every fortnight her Antidep comic strip[29] (created along with her sister) could be seen in The New Indian Express's Saturday Zeitgeist feature.

[citation needed] Jaya's poems have been published by Unisun in their anthologies (The Peacock's Cry,[31] I, me, myself, Timescapes, Mosaic[32] etc.

Her short story for adults, ‘The Monarch butterfly’, won the second prize in British Council-Unisun's national competition for writers of short stories 2005, and was selected by Shashi Deshpande for the collection title Winners,[35] published by Unisun, Bangalore.