Silence and few words have long been her forte, shaped in a middle-class household where her father worked as a bank branch manager and her mother was a homemaker

GM Pravin Thipsay attributes Women’s Candidates champion’s remarkable growth in last few years to her well-timed aggression and improved judgement calls; insists she can dethrone China’s Ju Wenjun at the World C’ship as her opponent is low on match practice