I had no interest in becoming a photographer. As the oldest of four sisters, I was the most photographed child in my family. My mother would often photograph me to validate an experience in her life. Being photographed was just another family ritual for me.

I had thought of studying graphic design, until I had to photograph the moods of a person for a class assignment… My mother fought with my very protective father to send me to the National Institute of Design. I went to photograph tabla maestro Zakir Hussain... but the organisers stopped me and I fell. My 18-year-old pride badly hurt, I waited for the ustad to finish his concert before crying out, "Mr Hussain, I am a young student today, but someday I will be an important photographer, then we will see." Zakir was amused, and invited me to travel with him.

I wanted to be open to the surprises life has to offer, to be free to be as I am. For six winters, I travelled with Zakir and all the musicians he played with. Zakir became my mentor. I think my true learning comes from those travels, listening to the finest classical musicians night after night.

My mother freed me from social norms…and even from herself. She had been a widow for some years, so when I bargained that I wanted to study at the International Centre of Photography in New York - instead of a dowry - she agreed that a good education was more beneficial. Marriage was not the be all and end all, she said. I spent a year studying documentary photography.

Naively believing I could make a difference, I returned and started photographing some desperate social situations of India. But Meherunissa, the child prostitute I photographed over two years, died anyway. The photographs were published extensively, but I had to accept that nothing changed in the lives of people I photographed.

In my desperation to continue photographing, I began to focus on my friends and their families. Thanks to a generous grant from Robert Frank, I could travel from city to city, living in friends' homes for months. I photographed them as if I wanted to make an album of everyone in my social world. In 1997, I had my first solo show ever, of these family portraits at Scalo Gallery in Zurich.

Possibly the finest surprise photography brought my way was my friendship with Mona Ahmed, who I photographed for a routine assignment on eunuchs in 1989. After photographing Mona and her changing worlds for 13 years, we created a book (Myself, Mona Ahmed) in 2001, for which Mona wrote a text about her life in the form of emails to Scalo publisher, Walter Keller.

Portraits without obvious people never seemed a possibility. While I was living at a friend's house in Goa, I visited the local church, meeting families and visiting homes to make portraits. One day, when Mrs. Braganza left the room, I realised that it was not empty, it was peopled by unseen generations and I could make portraits without an obvious person in it. Together with peopled portraits, these works formed Privacy, published by Steidl in 2003.

I was consumed by this seeming emptiness: beds of those who had passed away, but that were still made every day; chairs that were in the same place for decades, but whose sitters had moved on. This led to Chairs, a limited edition book made with Steidl in 2005.

Go Away Closer. While each series led to a book and several exhibitions, I wondered what might happen if I worked purely intuitively, photographing whatever I felt compelled to. The ensuing images seemed less self-conscious, but were bound by a strong emotion. When I sifted through them, Go Away Closer emerged. A purely private exploration at first, led to another book with Steidl and exhibitions in Delhi, Benares and Mumbai in 2007.