[4] Her father was a schoolteacher[5] in Ipoh in Malaysia, where she attended the SM (Sekolah Menengah) Convent School.
After graduating in 1994, she went to Hamilton College, and then joined the Ph.D. program in musicology at the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester.
She was working on Gypsy music festivals in France, for which she was awarded a Council for European Studies fellowship in 2002.
In 2006 she graduated from the MFA program in creative writing from the University of Michigan, where she worked on polishing her novel.
Evening Is the Whole Day focuses on the dark secrets of an affluent Malaysian Indian family (also living in Ipoh), and has been praised for its lyrical, inventive language, often using untranslated Tamil words, and using aspects of Bahasa syntax, such as reduplicatives as intensifiers.