Sisters Richa Moorjani and Sheherazaad, six years apart in age, walked the same hallways of Saratoga High School as students do today and had many of the same teachers. Like any typical high schooler, they attended classes, took tests and ate lunch at the same tables. However, their future aspirations differed from many of their STEM-oriented classmates. While in high school, both wanted to pursue performing arts such as acting and singing, and in the years since, each has achieved that dream.
Their parents were influential in these pursuits. Though the parents have day jobs outside of the entertainment industry, they have been in their own band called Geetanjali since the 1970s, which made them more supportive of their daughters’ decision to pursue the arts.
Now, Richa, who graduated in 2007, is a full-time actress and has had roles in many blockbuster TV shows such as Netflix’s “Never Have I Ever” and FX’s “Fargo.” She played the cousin, Kamala, in “Never Have I Ever” and Deputy Indira Olmstead in Season 5 of “Fargo.” Sheherazaad is a solo indie singer and composer and is currently on tour in Europe. Both sisters had experiences at the school that were instrumental to their future paths, allowing them early exposure to the entertainment industry.
Richa Moorjani: Finding success in the competitive Hollywood environment
Despite growing up in an academically intense community and being the daughter of immigrant South Asian parents, Richa always found her family to deviate from the “stereotypical Indian family” when it came to the arts and humanities.
Richa started kathak dancing from a young age and began performing in school plays and theater camps when she was in elementary school.
“Academics were still very much a priority to [my parents] for us, but at the same time, they also wanted us to pursue our creative passions,” she said. “If it weren’t for that support, I would never have ever even had the dream of becoming an actor.”
In her younger years, Richa found much of her inspiration to be an actress from television.
“I loved watching American television, but I think it was definitely Indian cinema that had the most impact on me in seeing myself represented,” she said. “I always thought that if I wanted to be an actor, it had to be in Indian films. This wasn’t because it was what I wanted to do; I thought that was my only option.”
Further exposing herself to acting in high school
Richa joined the drama program in her freshman year, which performed in the Thermond Drama Center, formerly called the Little Theater.
“The drama program and Little Theater were my safe space throughout high school,” she said. “Especially the Theater, it was my home away from home.”
Richa was also one of the essential members in creating the modern show “Bombay in the Bay.” Before she attended high school, the show was called “Friends and Family Night,” and was a low-key, small dance event of 100 attendees. However, in high school, she and her friends became the main coordinators of the event and decided to expand it and call it “Bombay in the Bay.”
While here, Richa also had many teachers who made a profound impact on her journey, including retired AP United States History teacher Kim Anzalone.
“It was the way she made me feel, in the way she believed in me not just as a student of APUSH, but she believed in and saw me as a person,” Richa said. “I think that’s so important for teachers to really see you as a full person. Not every teacher does that, so that meant so much to me.”
She also felt this way about many of her other teachers, including former drama teacher Kathleen Woods, history teacher Todd Dwyer, who passed away in 2021, English teacher Jason Friend and World History and AP Government teacher Kirk Abe.
Richa still remembers the impact Abe had on her, saying, “He was one of my favorite, favorite teachers. The same is true for all of them. Just such a wonderful person.”
Richa was in the graduating class of 2007 at Saratoga.
Post high school: College, moving to Los Angeles and starting out
As she approached the end of high school, Richa had her sights set on UCLA, wanting to live in Los Angeles and join the dance department. However, she ended up attending UC Davis and majoring in communications, with a minor in theater and dance.
Richa also continued dancing in college, even choreographing some dances herself for annual performances such as the UC Davis Culture Show. She joined the Davis Bollywood dance team called “Toofan.”
Courtesy of Richa Moorjani
A dance choreographed by Richa for the 2011 UC Davis Culture Show.
Richa also began taking weekly acting classes at the local Studio 24 in Folsom, Calif., during her senior year at Davis.
“That one class gave me all the resources and the confidence that I needed to move to LA when I finished school,” Richa said. “I kept saying I wanted to just finish school and be an actor, but I had no idea what that meant. That class really answered all those questions of what I needed to know. I was really grateful for that experience.”
After graduating in 2010, Richa moved back to Saratoga to stay with her parents. She began working at the Banana Republic in downtown Los Gatos for a few months to save money. After that, she made the life-changing decision to move to Los Angeles.
Though she was slightly anxious following the move, Richa found support and guidance in numerous friends and colleagues, easing her transition.
“I was renting a room from a family friend, and they were the only people that I knew. I didn’t know anybody else in LA at all,” she said. “I started taking acting classes pretty much right when I got there through a referral from [Studio 24].”
Richa also began her search for a manager, printing out over 100 headshots and mailing her cover letter to a list of agencies that she found online. In the weeks that followed, she received responses to a mere two of the 100 submissions. The one she ended up signing with was a tiny, hole in the wall boutique agency.
Shortly after signing, she booked a few small roles, including one on the “Mindy Project” starring Mindy Kaling.
“That was such an incredible experience,” she said. “The best thing about it was that it was a good credit to have on my resume and gave me leverage moving forward.”
Richa found a small community of South Asian actors while working in LA and developed a few close bonds that she has maintained to this day. However, being an actor from a minority race came with struggles.
“When I first started out, the biggest challenges were just getting in the door,” she said. “I would get called in for an audition, if it was specifically if they were looking for a brown girl, there were five to 10 other Indian actresses I would see at every audition.”
Richa equated this to directors considering all brown girls to “look the same,” creating competitiveness between the actresses for a small number of roles.
However, after the “Mindy Project” concluded, Richa was without work. For about the next seven years of her career, she moved back and forth from LA to India, trying to book a role anywhere she could. She went to hundreds of auditions, but didn’t get parts.
“There was so much uncertainty in my life in my late 20s,” Richa said. “That was the point where I started to feel like, not that I wanted to quit acting, but maybe I should start exploring different things I’m good at just because what if this doesn’t work out for me?”
Then, in early 2018, she received one of the most devastating calls of her career: Her management company had let her go.
“When your team loses faith in you when you already don’t really have much faith in yourself, it’s very, very soul crushing and devastating,” she said. “It’s also your direct line to getting work. I decided to not quit altogether, but to take a step back and not put all my focus and energy into acting.”
After a year of working temporary jobs while continuing acting classes, Richa reconnected with one of her old managers — James Jolly — at a play she was performing in. He has been her manager ever since.
‘Never Have I Ever’ and beyond
Right after Jolly and Richa began working together, Kaling used Instagram to put out an open casting call for an “Untitled Mindy Kaling Project,” which later became “Never Have I Ever.”
“I auditioned for Kamala because I was closest in age to her, and everybody that I knew, whether they were an actor or not, was sending in an audition for one of the three roles,” Richa said. “They got 20,000 submissions for the three roles, and they went through every single one. They watched every single tape.”
Two weeks after the tapes were sent in, there were three actresses narrowed down for Kamala, including Richa. They were all called in for a callback, and eventually, final audition — or screen test — with Mindy Kaling and other top decision makers.
“For me, that was already a win,” she said. “I was like, wow. The fact that out of all those submissions, they even narrowed it down and I’m part of that selection, that was huge to me.”
And finally, three days after the screen test, Richa got a call from her team while driving, saying that she had gotten the role.
“I had to pull over because I was so overwhelmed. I sat there for two hours FaceTiming everyone in my friends and family to tell them,” she said.
The show began filming two months later in Universal Studios Hollywood, only a 10-minute drive from where she was living at the time.
Throughout the filming of Season 1, Richa continued to dig into the character of Kamala. There were many parts of her role that she resonated with, and other aspects that she got to unpack throughout the first season and beyond.
“The thing that I related to most was the pressure she was under at that stage of her life and at that stage of my life as a South Asian woman,” she said. “She is also trying to balance her own dreams and her own ambitions with being a good Indian daughter and being a good Indian woman.”
Approaching the release of the show on April 27, 2020, Richa had fears about how it would be received, especially during the pandemic with no red carpet premiere or in-person press interviews.
“We all know with South when it comes to South Asian representation, our harshest critics are our South Asian audience,” she commented. “I was genuinely terrified of how people were going to receive my performance because I had never done a show that would be watched by so many people.”
On the night of its release, the show exploded in popularity. Within the first month, it had received 40 million views on Netflix. Richa recalls being purely in awe of the fan response, even hearing from some fans who had binged the entire show while she had been asleep for seven hours. Season 2 was announced to the cast two months later, and it was later renewed for Seasons 3 and 4.
Richa played the cousin, Kamala Nandiwadal, in “Never Have I Ever.”
Throughout the four seasons, Richa also formed lifelong bonds with the other cast and crew.
“Mindy is definitely one of [my biggest role models]. And Purna, who plays Nalini, is still one of my best friends,” she said. “I don’t know what I would do without her, honestly. She’s the mentor that I always wished that I had.”
While shooting Season 4 of “Never Have I Ever,” Richa’s manager encouraged her to audition for a role on the show “Fargo,” which was looking to cast a South Asian woman. About two months later, she got the role, and almost immediately after wrapping “Never Have I Ever,” flew to Calgary, Canada, to shoot for six months in the dead of winter.
Richa in “Fargo.”
After filming a few episodes of “Fargo,” Richa noticed that her role had nothing to do with her being Indian. Curious about the significance of her character being South Asian, she approached director Noah Hawley.
“He said, ‘No. No reason.’ To me, that was the best answer he could have ever given me,” Richa said. “It was simply that he wanted to create this very real human being that happens to be Indian-American and playing a role that could have really been played by anybody.”
She also noted that, had the role been open to any ethnicity, there was an almost-zero chance she would have gotten it.
Looking beyond “Never Have I Ever” and “Fargo,” Richa continues to work on other projects while living in LA. For any aspiring young actors, she preaches that there is no reason to let other people stop you from achieving your dream.
“You’re going to hear no from so many people, including maybe even your family. But if it’s what you really want to do, you have to put all your focus and energy into it,” she said. “Know that there are people before you who have done it, and there will be people after you who will do it, so there’s no reason you can’t do it.”
Sheherazaad: Deviating from the stereotype of most musicians
Sheherazaad’s journey in the arts began long before high school.
From a young age, she was more passionate about pursuing theater. However, without the stereotypical “American girl” appearance, she never dreamed of playing lead roles in most theater plays and musicals. Additionally, she never felt the pressure from her parents to pursue all kinds of traditional Indian arts.
Instead, Sheherazaad participated in theater camps and related activities throughout her childhood, including a performance at Wildwood Park.
“I remember on the Wildwood Park stage, we were doing Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory for one camp when I was around ten, and I really wanted to be Veruca Salt. She’s fabulous and right?” she said. “I got casted as an Oompa Loompa. I simply tried to own it. I have to give it to my little ten year old, curvy self.”
Along with her involvement in theater, music was always a great part of her life, and was also one of her biggest hobbies.
“When I was young, my mom would be holding me as a baby, and I would be singing with her while she was singing,” Sheherazaad said. “I just started to emulate her.”
Starting as a young child, Sheherazaad took private vocal coaching, and even entered local singing competitions. In 2012, she competed in a Teen Idol competition.
“My voice was very big for my age, and at that time there was a lot of emphasis on ‘Oh, look at how big her voice is. She can belt and all of that.’ Now I absolutely hate performing with that specific intention, but back then, that was what you did to prove yourself,” Sheherazaad said.
She recalls, however, not realizing the implicit biases present in the field when she was young, both due to her age and then-extroverted nature.
“I think that there’s probably an inkling in me that knew that I would never be able to do anything that my White American peers were doing in that performance space,” Sheherazaad said. “I think my soul probably knew that I wanted to be an artist. I consciously, mentally, didn’t register it at the time, given the lack of visual role modeling around me.”
After completing freshman year, Sheherazaad took a non-traditional route for her sophomore year. She had heard about a boarding school in India attended by another Saratoga student. Intrigued by this potential path, Sheherazaad jumped at the opportunity to not only disconnect from America for a while but also become closer with her Indian culture.
She attended a boarding school in the hills of Tamil Nadu, India, a K-12 school with over 400 students.
“The time that I went to boarding school, it felt like years, because there were just so many things that happened,” Sheherazaad said. “I was fresh off the boat from California, when I arrived and didn’t speak any of the local languages.”
She found the school to also have a diverse blend of classmates.
“Every fiber of the experience was different. The concept of friendship there made [the U.S.] seem very flimsy in comparison. India had a very different depth of human connection than I’d ever experienced,” she said.
She found the time after coming back from India especially hard, trying to reconnect with her former life but feeling disconnected.
“The concept of friendship [in India] is that you are fiercely loyal toward your friends,” Sheherazaad said. “I really experienced what friendship is like in the Indian context, where your friends will go to any lengths for you.”
Sheherazaad’s college experiences
Sheherazaad top choice school was New York University, and it was one of the only acceptances she received out of all her schools. She entered somewhat half-heartedly as a communications major, the same as Richa.
“It’s a very valid major to start out with, because we looked at film studies and reading the subtext in a moving image,” Sheherazaad said. “It all feeds into what I do with music videos now.”
She also drew upon her experiences at NYU in a user experience (UX) class, as she now contributes to making her own tour posters and other visuals.
One of the tour posters from Sheherazaad’s Europe tour of her EP “Qasr.”
Having gained admission into NYU, Sheherazaad had her eyes set on the Tisch School of Arts, specifically their film school. She applied and was accepted, but left Tisch shortly.
“All of the work that I was making there as a film major was extremely self-exoticizing,” she said.
She switched majors a few times after leaving Tisch — even considering physics at one point — before trying out Asian-Pacific Islander Studies. As part of the major, she took a class titled South Asian American literature, taught by Dr. Sukhdev Sandhu.
“He showed us a lot of work from the British-South Asian underground rebel, subversive movement that happened in the 1990s. I felt my soul on fire,” she remembered. “I was like, ‘This is somehow where I see myself forever.’”
Later in her studies at NYU, however, Sheherazaad left college and moved to India to study in a monastery.
“I went to Uttar Pradesh, India, where my dad is from, and I started immersing myself in the special academic culture at this monastic institute,” she said. “It was a very formative time.”
There, she not only formally studied Sanskrit, one of the foundational languages of Indian religious practice, but was deeply immersed Hindi by speaking to the other girls. She also learned to recite hymns.
“I was totally taken in by the soundscape. So I just decided to live there for a while,” she said.
Though she did return to NYU, Sheherazaad planned to return to India and further explore her roots and ancestral traditions.
Sheherazaad graduated from NYU with a major in Education Studies. She was and still is a dedicated theater and film actress, but found that recently, more of her time has been put towards music. To this day, she maintains a balance between acting, music and writing, all of which she sees as necessary to one another.
“I knew after college that I didn’t want to sing in English, which was my training,” she recalled. “I was like ‘I’m only going to do music if I can attempt it in Hindi or Urdu.’”
Post-graduation and immersing herself in Indian language
Searching for Hindi classes to take, Sheherazaad temporarily relocated to the Bay Area after graduation. She ended up in an Arabic class at Mission College.
“I got there and I was like, ‘They’re speaking Hindi. So much of this is the Hindi I know.’ And I had no idea, as a non-native Hindi speaker, that so much of our Hindi actually is derived from Arabic. I fell in love with the language,” she recalled.
Still seeking more direct immersion, she also participated in an Urdu program at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in their robust South Asian language department.
Sheherazaad’s music style and stylistic choices
When choosing her artist name, Sheherazaad drew from a childhood book she had read, which was a retelling of “One Thousand and One Arabian Nights.” The princess character in that epic was named Scheherazade, inspiring her name choice.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Sheherazaad was living with a relative in the East Bay and self-published her first underground album, Khwaabistan, which translates to “Land of Dreams” in Urdu.
“For Khwaabistan, I really wanted to write from the perspective of a displaced voice,” she said. “When you have a male arranger who’s planning out a song, they very often don’t know how to work with female vocals, and will pitch it up to this unrealistic octave. It is super unnatural, and almost infantilizes the female voice.”
Contrary to this stereotype, Sheherazaad sings in a lower vocality and range, about topics like what it means to grow up in an immigrant household, or to live in the diaspora and constantly code switch.
“I still don’t lean towards a lot of electronic instrumentation, because it’s saturating. I try to pan away from that and seek out acoustic, organic instruments,” she said.
Making her music in a non-traditional style, with regards to both the United States and Bollywood industry, Sheherazaad found her loyal audience in a more niche community.
“What I’ve realized in my touring experience is that European audiences really resonate with this music,” she remarked. “That for example, a white European audience member in Berlin would approach me post show and compliment the music.”
While finding her footing in different emerging music niches and genres, Sheherazaad finds immense satisfaction in the work she produces.
“There’s this pride in being on the periphery, because it’s such an exciting space,” she said, “people don’t have expectations from you, versus if you get turned into that sort of factory-like Bollywood sort of thing.”
With an EP, Qasr, already released, she sees herself producing several more albums in her career.
“There will always be a negotiation and interplay between theater, writing, and acting for me. I want to keep on doing all of it. In terms of music, it will forever be there, the riyaaz (practice).”
Relationship between the two sisters
As with any siblings, Richa and Sheherazaad’s are very different. However, they maintain an close bond and are continuously inspired by each other’s successes.
Richa notes Sheherazaad’s grit and individuality to be some of her key traits, though in the end, the arts bind them together.
“Sheherazaad is somebody who, from childhood, has always been unapologetic about who she is and never ever caved into being any way that people want her to be or fitting into any box,” Richa said. “At the end of the day, I think what’s really always made us so close is our connection to the arts and being artists. That’s a very sacred, special bond and without it, we wouldn’t be the same.”
Similarly, Sheherazaad notes the joy she has found in watching Richa forge her path through the industry.
“As a kid, I used to idolize her glamor and beauty. Now I see something much deeper that I look forward to the rest of the world continuing to discover about her,” Sheherazaad said. “She’s the soulmate I never asked for but who I always need deep down. When there’s nobody else, there’s her.”
