She was the daughter of Purushottama Lal, the founder of Writers Workshop as well as a renowned poet and transcreator of the Mahabharata, and his wife Shyamasree Devi.
Tagore, Khalil Gibran, Blake, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Scroll-Patachitra painters and indigenous folk-artists of India were some of her major inspirations.
She taught art and craft at Bengal's ashrams and worked as a designer, a calligraphist, and an illustrator of books of poetry and fiction, including Dragons by Kewlian Sio; The Saffron Cat, The Magic Mango Tree, The Mahabharata and The Three Riddles by her father P. Lal; The Window and The Warriors by herself; and several other publications.
[1] In 2004, Lal was among various Indian artists invited by the Genesis Art Gallery in Kolkata to produce a modern interpretation of the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci.
Her contemporary version was a work of digital art, which placed the image of Mona Lisa on a series of computer screens receding into one another.
Lal also analysed, critiqued, verified and documented the works of other Indian and international artists, including Jamini Roy, Rabindranath Tagore, Amrita Shergil, Gopal Ghose, Nandalal Bose, Abanindranath Tagore, Ganesh Pyne, Paritosh Sen, S. H. Raza, Sakti Burman, Manjit Bawa, Vivan Sundaram, Krishen Khanna, Gurcharan Singh, Anupam Sud, Trupti Patel, Maite Delteil, Shahabuddin Ahmed, Jannis Markopoulos of Berlin, Tamara de Laval of Sweden, Olivia Fraser of India and London and Dhokra sculptor Rajib Kumar Maiti.