[8] She received a full scholarship to attend Harvard University as an undergraduate, where with a loan from a roommate she bought a Nikkormat camera, which was stolen upon her return to Bombay in the 1980s.

[8] At Harvard she majored in English and American Literature, she took many film courses including filmmaking taught by Alfred Guzzetti.

Next she joined the Cinema Studies Department at New York University, and after receiving her MA in Film Theory and Criticism, in 1981, she returned to India to work as a freelance still photographer.

[8] She returned to Los Angeles in 1988 and worked as a screenwriter, writing commissioned screenplays for a wide variety of studios including Universal, HBO and Disney.

[citation needed] In 2016 she directed a 14-minute documentary virtual reality film Yeh Ballet[14] for Anand Gandhi's Memesys Culture Lab.

[9]...she had the eye, the patience, the empathy of a seasoned portraitist; but she also had something even harder to find — a lifelong, unillusioned, affectionate closeness to an entire community whose numbers were dwindling with every passing year (Pico Iyer, in Home in the City, 2017).

[citation needed] A larger version of Home in the City with 102 photographs was exhibited at Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai, from 14 through 31 October 2017.

[17] An accompanying book, Home in the city: Bombay 1977 – Mumbai 2017, was released with essays by Pico Iyer and Salman Rushdie.