Washington, Oct 20 (SocialNews.XYZ) A friend’s sudden death at 35 pushed Delhi-born engineer Monica Saigal to quit her corporate career and start writing, a choice that has since produced 14 books, the Northern Virginia author said.
“I always wanted to write since I was about five years old,” Saigal told IANS. But she grew up in what she called “a very conservative, you know, Delhi Punjabi household, and our choices were doctor, lawyer, engineer, or marry rich.”
“So I always like to say I’m one of the original three idiots. I became the engineer with two master’s degrees,” she said.
Saigal was born in Delhi and was six when her family moved to Bahrain, where it stayed for close to 30 years. The family later returned to India, and she earned her engineering degree from BMS in Bangalore.
She came to the US in 1991 for graduate study, first at Lynchburg College in Virginia and then at George Washington University. She remembers arriving in a freezing January, having “never seen snow before,” and finding small-town Virginia startlingly quiet after “the craziness of being in India where all your senses are wide awake all the time.”
There was no Indian grocery store in Lynchburg. She recalled borrowing cardamom from the wife of the lone Indian professor on campus.
She later worked at Ernst & Young and then at Hewitt Associates in Northern Virginia. A close friend in Cleveland, a German American, kept urging her to write. Saigal kept saying she would do it after retiring.
Then came a phone call from the friend’s husband. At 35, the friend had fallen on a sidewalk, hit her head and died.
“Her question kept ringing in my mind, you know, what makes you think you’re going to be old enough to retire?” Saigal said. “So I quit my full-time job, cutting the family income by half and started to write. And I haven’t looked back since.”
The early years were lean. “The first year I started writing about food, I made $5,000,” she said.
Food writing led to cookbooks, including Modern Spice, published by Simon & Schuster. She later pitched a children’s book, Papa’s Butter Chicken, to Random House without an agent, inspired by cooking with her father.
She called it one of her most precious books “because I just lost my dad recently.” When the book reached him, she said, “he looked so awkward, but he looked so proud.”
One of her hardest books came from her own life. Her former husband fell seriously ill, and she became his caregiver in the intensive care unit. She turned that experience into a journal-style book for ICU caregivers, copies of which she said have been donated to visitors at Inova Fairfax Hospital.
“Caregiving, I think, is one of the hardest acts of love that you can perform for someone,” she said. “And it’s also one of those that’s so, so, so exhausting. We don’t talk about that.”
Her new book, The Lotus Blooms Twice, is a short story collection about women in later life. “At a certain age in life, the labels start going away,” Saigal said. “Like, unfortunately, I’ve lost my parents. I’m no longer married. My children are now independent. So when all the labels go away, who are you?”
The title draws on the lotus, which she said “closes at night and then blooms again with the morning sunlight.”
She wants that second bloom to come “with intention and with ease,” rather than with the usual praise for women’s endurance. “Why can’t we be joyful and feminine and filled with ease, with the sisterhood supporting us instead of, wow, life is hard,” she said.
Saigal, 57, said many of the stories deliberately leave their endings open. “I have succeeded in annoying the reader, which was my goal,” she said. “But I’ve also succeeded in opening up discussions.”
She sees a bright moment for Indian writing in English. “Now you go to an Indian bookstore in India and you are spoiled for choices,” she said. She said readership in India remains strong: “Like in India, there’s a very high number of readers.”
Her advice to aspiring writers is blunt. “Sit and write. You cannot edit a blank page and you cannot sell an idea,” she said.
Asked whether she regrets leaving a six-figure salary, she laughed. “There are days. Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “I feel very satisfied and I feel very much at peace, and I think that’s priceless.”
“Many of these arts are not a profession. It’s a calling,” she said. “And if you don’t answer that calling, it’s not going to leave you alone.”
Source: IANS
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