 Her childhood experiences included World War II air raids, seeing people starving in the Bengal famine of 1943, and the impact of large numbers of refugees arriving in Calcutta after the partition of India.She attended Gokhale Memorial Girls' School and Lady Brabourne College.She received her BA in English from Presidency University, Calcutta (then a college), and was a student of inaugural batch of the Department of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University, from where she obtained her MA in 1958.