Arshi was educated at Lampton Comprehensive School and grew up in an Indian Sikh family from Punjab in Hounslow.

[18] Arshi went on to judge the Forward Prize for Poetry in 2017[19] and hosted the Awards with Andrew Marr at the Royal Festival Hall.

[22] In 2017, BBC Radio 4 broadcast Arshi's commissioned poem "Odysseus, The Patron Saint of Foreigners?

This collection continues to address her brother's death[25] and to experiment with form, with prose poems, a sestina and a tanka, and includes poetic responses to Lorca, Emily Dickinson, The Odyssey and The Mahabharata.

[26][27] The title poem and an essay, "On Gods, Human Rights and the Poet", were published in the US magazine POETRY[28] in 2019.

In the essay, Arshi comments: "A poem is not a human rights instrument or the pleadings in a court case, nor should it seek to be but one activity that the human rights lawyer and poet share is the restless interrogation of language....Poetry needs to continue to strive to make space for itself and think the unthinkable, the unimaginable on the page."

Set in suburban London, it tells of a British Indian family whose younger daughter, Ruby, develops selective mutism.