Can Grief Rewrite Your Immigrant Dream And Help You Find A New Sky? | Shivani Malik

In this episode of Healthy Mind, Healthy Life, host Avik Chakraborty sits down with scientist, biotech leader and debut novelist Shivani Malik to unpack how grief can quietly reroute a life that looks “perfect” on paper.

Shivani shares how losing her mother. the person who championed her move from India to the US for a PhD and a career in cancer research. forced her to ask a hard question. Am I building the life I truly choose. or the one that was handed to me as the immigrant gold standard

Her debut novel “The Sky Is Different Here” becomes the container for that inquiry. blending STEM and storytelling to explore grief, ambition, belonging, identity, women in STEM and the emotional cost of chasing the immigrant dream. If you have ever hit your goals and still felt strangely empty. this conversation will land close to home and give you pragmatic language and tools to actually sit with your emotions instead of outrunning them.

 

About The Guest:

 

Shivani Malik is a scientist, immigrant, biotech leader and debut novelist. She moved from India to the United States for her PhD. trained at Stanford and UCSF and built a high impact career in cancer research and drug development.

After the sudden death of her mother. Shivani began writing as a way to process unresolved grief and question the version of success she had been running toward. That process eventually became her debut novel “The Sky Is Different Here.” a work of fiction rooted in real emotional truths about loss, belonging and the complexity of being a woman, immigrant and dream chaser.

Today she continues her work in biotech while using story as a way to build community around shared struggle, invisible expectations and the cost of never slowing down.

 

Key Takeaways:

• Grief will not stay in the background forever. Shivani reached a point in her postdoctoral training where the “unopened package of grief” for her mother made it impossible to keep functioning on autopilot.

• The immigrant dream can silently become an emotional contract. She names how passion for science and external expectations blend. making it hard to tell where genuine desire ends and cultural pressure begins.

• Fiction gave her psychological safety. By fictionalizing roughly shaped versions of her lived experience. she could tell the emotional truth without exposing specific people, institutions or workplaces.

• Science and storytelling share the same backbone. In the lab you still “tell a story” about how a cancer drug works and who it can help. That pattern of connecting dots translated directly into shaping a novel.

• Healing required both solitude and community. Writing helped her sit with grief. but reading other grief stories and later sharing her own created a sense of community that science culture had not given her.

• Everyone carries loss and dislocation. whether it is a person, a home or a sense of belonging. Shivani urges listeners to find some way to express it. through writing, conversation, walking, meditation or sitting with feelings instead of numbing them.

• Expression is step one. sharing is step two. Naming your experience with someone who truly “gets it” becomes a powerful way to move forward rather than just cope.

How To Connect With Shivani Malik  :

Shivani mentioned three primary ways to reach her.

• Book 

• Personal Website : You can leave her a direct message and learn more about “The Sky Is Different Here.”

 

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