Sumana Roy, an associate professor at Ashoka University, is from Siliguri, a city in Darjeeling district of West Bengal, India, where she spent most of her life.

[6][7] Roy writes a monthly column, Treelogy, in The Hindu Business Line about plant life.

[13] Based on real life incident, 2012 Guwahati molestation of teenage girl, and set over seven days, Missing narrates the story of Kobita, an academic and social activist in her fifties, who goes missing as she goes out to help a girl being molested by thirty men, leaving behind her blind husband and poet Nayan Sengupta along with the domestic helps of Bimalda, Shibhu, Ratan and Bani.

The title alludes to the structural framework of her sequence of compositions, the various subjects studied in a school syllabus, with the poems grouped according to the type of lesson taught.

For Perloff, Roy's ability to range over a multitude of scientific disciplines – Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Geography, History, Botany and Art – in order to tease out the poignant anatomies of feelings bound up with love, longing and loss while maintaining an aesthetic detachment, was reminiscent of the works of Sylvia Plath, but tempered by a degree of philosophical distance unlike the anger driving Plath's oeuvre.

J. Hillis Miller noted the dialectical interplay between the rational order of the book's formal organization as evidenced by the clinical list of syllabus items that groups the poems, and the exuberant figures of speech characteristic of their imagery.

[22][23] Roy's unpublished novel Love in the Chicken’s Neck was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize (2008).