Virginia’s Monica Saigal Writes About Everything That Matters
WASHINGTON, D.C.- Monica Saigal, 57, left her corporate career after the sudden death of a close friend prompted her to reconsider her life and pursue a childhood ambition to write. The decision has since led to a career spanning 14 books, including cookbooks, children’s literature and short stories about women’s lives.
“I always wanted to write since I was about five years old,” Saigal said. But she grew up in what she described as “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.
She moved to the US in 1991 for graduate studies, first at Lynchburg College in Virginia and then at George Washington University.
There was no Indian grocery store in Lynchburg, and she recalled borrowing cardamom from the wife of the only Indian professor on campus.
A close friend living in Cleveland repeatedly encouraged her to pursue writing, but Saigal kept postponing it until retirement. hat changed when the friend’s husband called to tell her that the 35-year-old had fallen on a sidewalk, hit her head and died.
She quit her full-time job despite the decision cutting her family income by half and began writing. “The first year I started writing about food, I made $5,000,” she said.
Her food writing eventually led to cookbooks, including ‘Modern Spice’, published by Simon & Schuster. She later approached Random House without a literary agent with a proposal for a children’s book inspired by cooking with her father. The result was ‘Papa’s Butter Chicken’.
Another deeply personal work emerged from her experience caring for her former husband during a serious illness in an intensive care unit. She turned the experience into a journal-style book for ICU caregivers, copies of which she said have been donated to visitors at Inova Fairfax Hospital in Virginia.
“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 latest book, ‘The Lotus Blooms Twice’, is a short-story collection about women in later life and the questions they face as familiar roles and identities change.
“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.” Through the collection, she explores how women can approach a new phase of life with greater freedom, joy and support rather than being expected simply to endure hardship.
She wants that second bloom to come “with intention and with ease.”
“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 said many of the stories deliberately leave their endings open, inviting readers to reflect on the characters’ choices and discuss their own interpretations.
“I have succeeded in annoying the reader, which was my goal,” she said. “But I’ve also succeeded in opening up discussions.”
She also sees growing opportunities for Indian writing in English, pointing to the range of books now available to readers in India. “Now you go to an Indian bookstore in India and you are spoiled for choices,” she said.
For aspiring writers, her advice is straightforward: “Sit and write. You cannot edit a blank page and you cannot sell an idea.”
“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.” (IANS)
