"Father was a very private person. So were mum and I,” says Aafreed Sabavala, of her parents, Jehangir, the modernist painter and wife Shirin (pictured). Quoted in The Mid-Day of February 26, 2017, a few days after her mother passed away at age 92 on February 18, 2017, the report elaborates that Shirin was the daughter of a prominent botanist and grew up largely in Nagpur where 
her father Jehangir Dastur was employed. While she majored in social sciences, she could, with ease, identify most plants with their English, local and botanical names. The painter had met Shirin in London when she was enrolled in the London School of Economics and he was studying at the Heatherley School of Art in the mid 1940s. She was the perfect consort for Jehangir from every point of view, commented artist Meera Devidayal who knew the couple for four decades, according to a Mumbai Mirror report of February 19. She was "a fond chronicler of a sepia-tinted Bombay that is slowly fading away,” adds the report.
"She was part of the discussion on every painting,” notes gallerist Geetha Mehra, who is also a committee member of the Jehangir Sabavala Foundation, set up by Shirin after Jehangir’s passing away in 2011. The Foundation holds an annual memorial lecture and supports upcoming artists. Shirin donated her husband’s paintings, drawings, sketchbooks, papers, photographs and many books from his personal library to the Prince of Wales Museum of Western India (now renamed Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya) after the artist’s passing away (see "Celebrating Sabavala,” Parsiana, November 21, 2015). "The bequest is more than the mere housing of his last works; it is an archive of his working life and the fruition of his ideas,” Shirin had told a packed gathering at the Museum on September 15, 2015.
Shirin and Jehangir shared similar outlooks on life, Mehra told the Mid-Day on February 19, 2017. She narrated that the couple had "filed away snippets from various periods of their lives” in which Shirin took a keen interest and "spent hours every day with the archivist looking into the digitization.”