Her first story "Lucky Horace" was published in the Damn You magazine founded and edited by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Sara's cousins Alok and Amit Rai in the early 1960s.

In her essay "You will be the Katherine Mansfield of Hindi",[6] Sara Rai reflects her struggle of becoming a writer and finding her own literary voice in the multilingual and -cultural backgrounds of both her family and her home town Allahabad.

By recalling memories of her growing up as a child and author in an environment of intellectual inspiration and creative freedom, this autobiographical account also reveals the emotional shallows and strokes of fate happening to a family who is under the shadow of a famous ancestor.

Many topics of her stories are universal – the struggles of getting old in a quickly transforming world, the search for identity in turbulent times, and the experience of being socially excluded in terms of belonging to a ‘different’ class, gender, religion, or socio-economical background.

In other stories, such as in "Criminal on the run" (Mujrim Faraar), Rai uses a colloquial style to imitate a mix of illiterate local dialect and urban Bollywood slang as spoken in contemporary Mumbai.

[13] The Hindi scholar Thomas de Bruijn states that "Rai's work shows the evocative power of a literary idiom in which the heritage of many premodernities are accumulated.

Its dialogic nature, refusing to be fixed to a single, monologic identity, makes it a perfect idiom for expressing the conundrum of modernity in a contemporary Indian context.

[15] Rai's interest in depicting the nuances of human feelings and interactions not only establishes a literary affinity to the Nayi Kahani in Hindi literature, but also to other modern and contemporary writers such as Anton Chekhov, Marcel Proust and Alice Munro.

However, when the question of marriage arises, he agrees to marry a woman chosen by his parents instead of taking side for his true love (but presumably low-caste) Meena – which turns out a fatal decision.