Nishant Batsha, MOTHER OCEAN FATHER NATION: A Novel
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[0:58]Nishant Batcha is the author of Mother Ocean Father Nation.
[1:02]He is a writer of fiction and histories.
[1:05]Nishant is the author of the 2022 novel, which I just said, Mother Ocean Father Nation, and is currently at work on a bomb place close to the heart, which is coming out in 2025.
[1:17]And that is a novel set between California and New York at the dawn of World War I.
[1:21]He holds a PhD in history from Columbia University, as well as a masters from the University of Oxford.
[1:26]On a doctoral fellowship and ESU-SF scholarship, and an undergraduate degree from Columbia.
[1:33]His academic research focused on Indian indentured labor in Trinidad and Fiji.
[1:38]Nishant's writing has been supported by the Headland Center for the Arts and the Praylinger Library, as well as fellowships such as the Paul and Daisy
[1:44]Soros Fellowship for New Americans.
[1:46]He works as a digital engagement and communications manager for words without borders and lives in Buffalo, New York with his wife and two children.
[1:53]Welcome, Nishant. Thank you so much for coming on Momstone.
[1:56]Don't have time to read books to discuss Mother Ocean Father Nation.
[2:00]And I just saw the news about your new book deal, so congratulations on that as well.
[2:04]Thank you so much, and thanks for having me to that.
[2:06]My pleasure.
[2:07]Can you please tell listeners what your book is about?
[2:10]Mother Ocean Father Nation is set on an unnamed fictional South Pacific,
[2:18]and the bid 1980s.
[2:20]And it follows the story of a brother and a sister, a J-ball and Pumi.
[2:25]And their country is at that point falling apart.
[2:29]There is a military coup that's happening in the background fueled by a lot of fervent nationalism.
[2:34]And the book follows these siblings during this any time.
[2:38]And Pumi eventually has to leave the country as a refugee to California,
[2:42]whereas J-ball stays behind.
[2:45]Interesting. And why this book? Where did this come from?
[2:49]This came out of, well, first it came out of a lot of books.
[2:54]I wrote this over 10 years, and I think I wrote four or five books to get to this one.
[3:01]I mean, I would write full manuscripts and abandon them.
[3:05]Usually there'd be one character or one curl information that I'd find interesting,
[3:09]and that would fuel the next book.
[3:11]It really was not the most efficient way of writing.
[3:14]I didn't say anyone, but, you know, I think I had like hundreds of thousands of words.
[3:19]No, no, no, no.
[3:21]But while I was, you know, writing, experimenting and finding these characters,
[3:26]I was also doing a PhD in history at Columbia.
[3:29]And while I was at Columbia, I was writing my dissertation on Indian indentured
[3:34]servitude in Fiji and Trinidad.
[3:37]And so for those who don't know, after slavery was abolished in 1835,
[3:41]the British Empire used indentured Indian labor.
[3:45]So from South Asia from the subcontinent,
[3:47]they would be sent across the globe to sugar plantations,
[3:50]starting in the Caribbean, but then in the Indian Ocean,
[3:53]in places like Mauritius and East Africa, in Southeast Asia,
[3:57]and in the South Pacific and Fiji.
[3:59]And they would work five year contracts, so they could knock it out of once they were,
[4:03]once that document had been signed.
[4:05]And if they wanted to ever go back home, they'd have to work another five years.
[4:08]And so because no one wanted to go back to the sugar plantations,
[4:11]that for those five years, I was quite delicious.
[4:14]They would, they would just, you know, end their contracts,
[4:17]and they would stay in these islands.
[4:18]That's why to the state places of Trinidad and Havana and South Africa,
[4:22]and Gonda had Indian populations and all dates back to this.
[4:25]And so that introduced me to this whole Indian diaspora that I knew very little about.
[4:30]And so it was sort of like I was writing a book and doing this research in tandem.
[4:34]And I couldn't say that one few will be other.
[4:37]They were just sort of both happening.
[4:39]And the characters from one would just suffuse through my mind.
[4:43]And so I think that experience during research formed a sort of background to this book
[4:49]where the characters sort of emerged as I was doing these, you know, fictional practices,
[4:53]practice runs on the all.
[4:55]So it was, it was a very productive writing time.
[4:57]I think I wrote a lot during those years.
[5:00]Oh my gosh.
[5:01]I want to know what, when the moment, like what was it like after finishing draft three or draft four and being like,
[5:08]yeah, no, this still, this one didn't work either.
[5:10]Like, like, where did you get, how did you even get to that point and decide,
[5:14]no, I'm, I'm starting over again.
[5:16]It just would, it would be sort of those like lightning flash moments, you know.
[5:21]It just, I remember I was writing one draft and it was just,
[5:25]I think I was on vacation with my wife in St. Louis of this book in California.
[5:32]And it's just like, in that, you know, moments of relaxation, you're able to unwind.
[5:37]And I think I was just like, this is not working.
[5:39]I need to start off course.
[5:40]So I didn't ruin the vacation.
[5:42]The fact is quite freeing.
[5:43]It's like, okay, this is what's not working.
[5:45]And here's how I'm going to get back home.
[5:47]This is what I'm going to do.
[5:48]And this is how it's going to, this is how it's going to work.
[5:51]My favorite story though, is that when I thought I was actually really done with this book,
[5:56]I gave it to my literary agent, Jamie Carr, who's a wonderful,
[6:00]she's over at the book group.
[6:01]Yeah.
[6:02]And she read it.
[6:03]She's like, it's good.
[6:04]If she never want to hear that, it's just that sort of lukewarm.
[6:07]It's yeah.
[6:08]And then she asked this question because J ball, who's a major character in the book,
[6:13]she, he was not actually in that draft.
[6:15]And she asked this question, like, what's he up to?
[6:18]The only line about him is that she stayed in the country.
[6:21]And so she asked me what's he doing was happening in the country.
[6:25]What's his life?
[6:26]And I think I really resisted that question.
[6:29]I said, oh no, I know exactly what you're asking.
[6:32]And I know exactly which one.
[6:34]I'm not going to do it.
[6:35]I'm not going to write a new book.
[6:36]And then she said, you don't sit with it for a week.
[6:38]And I sat for, I sat with it for a week.
[6:41]And I was like, oh, this is the best question because I get to return to the material.
[6:45]I get to see it from a completely different point of view.
[6:48]I get to really explore the ins and outs.
[6:51]So whereas like, who me was written over the course of four or five years,
[6:55]all the J ball stuff was written in six months.
[6:58]It was a fever dream.
[7:00]And like a surgeon, I had to go back and graph him into the manuscript
[7:06]to make it seem like he was always there and make it seem less narrative.
[7:10]So that was the most fun revision, I think.
[7:12]I could say it was fun now for more than today.
[7:15]Oh my gosh.
[7:16]It was a lot of work.
[7:17]But we know this whole time.
[7:18]I've been trying to remember the name of that famous hotel in San Luis Obispo.
[7:21]Wasn't it called like the Madonna Anderson thing?
[7:23]Was that it?
[7:24]Donna, is that where you were?
[7:26]Donna, if that is a very strange hotel,
[7:29]I have a postcard from a friend of mine who said he was obsessed with it as a seven year old.
[7:34]Oh my gosh.
[7:38]It's so hot.
[7:39]We drove down the California coast last summer and stopped there to like use the bathroom or something ridiculous.
[7:44]And it was like a thousand degrees.
[7:45]We're like, oh my gosh.
[7:46]You have to go out of here.
[7:48]Anyway, wait.
[7:50]So take me back to getting started and why you're getting a PhD to begin with.
[7:55]And like where did your whole career begin?
[7:57]And what were you interested in as a kid?
[7:59]Did you always want to write or read always into history and like wherever you born?
[8:03]I don't know.
[8:04]Just take me up to here quickly.
[8:05]Wow.
[8:06]I was born in the San Francisco Bay area in California.
[8:10]I can't say I wanted to be anything growing up.
[8:13]I mean, I read a lot.
[8:14]It was always a library.
[8:16]My public library was like my favorite place from when I was a kid through high school.
[8:20]I would once I learned how to drive, I would actually drive myself there every day.
[8:24]To do my homework and then just kind of hang out the library to a closing.
[8:29]How far was the library from your house?
[8:31]Maybe 15 minutes.
[8:32]It was sort of like that California sprawl.
[8:35]Yeah.
[8:36]Nothing is lockable.
[8:37]But everything is like a 15, 20 minute drive.
[8:39]And so I drive from my high school just 20 minutes away.
[8:41]It's a library.
[8:42]And then back comes kind of a triangle.
[8:44]My parents were just, I think they.
[8:46]I look back and it's like, man, that was a great.
[8:48]And your parents would be lucky.
[8:50]But I don't think being a writer or being in the humanities ever really cross my mind.
[8:58]It just wasn't something that was that I was exposed to.
[9:01]I was like the only person my family could read books.
[9:04]And so, you know, my father came to this country in the 70s.
[9:07]My mother and he was an engineer.
[9:10]And my mother worked at, has worked at the same target store in Dublin, California since 1990.
[9:17]Oh my gosh.
[9:18]So there's sort of, there's sort of like an inherent stability.
[9:22]Don't rock.
[9:23]But the mentality of both of them.
[9:25]It was in college where I first discovered history and the humanities in general.
[9:30]I had come back from a medical week. I actually was very sick in my first year of college.
[9:35]I had to withdraw from school as in the hospital for a while.
[9:39]What happened?
[9:40]I think like what we know now about COVID and sort of post viral syndrome.
[9:43]Sort of like I had a flu and then like it just never left.
[9:47]And so I had just a sort of like long illness that they had to.
[9:51]At the time this was, you know, 15, 16 years ago.
[9:54]They didn't really didn't know how to treat stuff like that.
[9:56]So it was just sort of like,
[9:58]just wait it out.
[9:59]I hope you get your ass.
[10:00]And I eventually came back and it was just sort of like,
[10:05]what do I do now?
[10:06]I just didn't really know what I wanted to do.
[10:10]It was sort of like my four of them
[10:11]and it was a professor in a history class
[10:15]that I was just took on a work,
[10:18]Catarina, Pizzagoni, Latin American civilization won.
[10:21]You know, it was a 200 person class
[10:23]and she pulled me aside and just said,
[10:24]you know, you have a talent for writing,
[10:26]have you thought about being a history picture?
[10:28]And like, of course, I was like star-eyed.
[10:30]I was like, I'm gonna become a story.
[10:34]And it was on that track
[10:37]and before I started my patient at Columbia,
[10:39]I was actually at Oxford in the UK
[10:42]and I had this summer in between
[10:44]where I had nothing to do and so it's just like
[10:45]sitting at pubs and writing just for myself,
[10:48]which I'd split my writing practice
[10:49]had been for a long time.
[10:51]And I had an essay published on this website
[10:53]called The All, which sadly no longer exists,
[10:55]but a lot of writers has to be all in this day day.
[10:58]And I thought, oh, people will read my writing.
[11:01]I'm gonna write some more and maybe I'll start,
[11:03]you know, working on a book or something
[11:05]and I started doing that more and more.
[11:06]And by the time I got to my PhD program,
[11:08]I was like, I'm leaving.
[11:09]Like, you know, I found something new
[11:11]and I'm gonna embark on that path.
[11:13]And I ended up reaching out to a couple of writers
[11:16]who I knew had PhDs and asked for their advice
[11:20]and they were like, just stay,
[11:21]you don't know how good you have it.
[11:23]You've got to stay fair.
[11:24]You've got health insurance, you're living in New York.
[11:26]You know, like, this is a very good life.
[11:28]And so I stayed and switched my research
[11:31]to working on Indian adventure.
[11:33]And that was sort of like the,
[11:36]the, I was off to the races from there.
[11:39]And the book and the research really worked in tandem
[11:43]because because I was doing that project,
[11:46]I got to spend a whole year traveling.
[11:48]I was interned at during carnival,
[11:50]met up with some, you know,
[11:51]artists and poets there and joined their carnival band
[11:55]and lived in Fiji for several months.
[11:58]Spend some time and they can archive it by.
[12:00]It was just as amazing.
[12:02]It was great, I highly recommend it.
[12:05]And it was also great because I was,
[12:08]you know, riding on the side,
[12:09]I wrote this essay in Fiji about the Methodist Church of Fiji
[12:12]and it was the Methodist Church supported
[12:14]one of the three Coos Fiji side since independence.
[12:18]And one of the Coos is explicitly anti-Indian
[12:21]and there was this Indian division
[12:23]of the Methodist Church in an interview members
[12:25]and it's leadership asking why are you here?
[12:27]Why are you in this church?
[12:29]And the answer is that sort of, you know, paradox.
[12:31]It's a friend of faith where people, you know,
[12:33]found belonging even in a place that was not necessarily
[12:37]welcoming to them.
[12:39]But that essay really opened up a whole series
[12:41]of questions to be about race, the nation, home.
[12:45]And I think from there, you know,
[12:47]those little novel projects I was working on,
[12:49]found a place and the two, and it grew
[12:52]in fertile soil from there.
[12:54]Wow.
[12:55]All right, who were these other authors
[12:57]and did they throw you a book party
[12:58]is what I want to know?
[12:59]Who told you not to quit your PhD program?
[13:01]The authors were the poet Monica de la Torre
[13:04]who was then at that point, she was the fiction editor
[13:08]at Bomb Magazine.
[13:10]And I was born short as slip into her,
[13:12]I think I entered her two weeks.
[13:14]In the two weeks, I was able to glean some advice from her
[13:18]and the other writer was the writer said that,
[13:21]who I think teaches at the Eugene Lang School at the New School.
[13:24]And he used it in several novels
[13:26]and a great little demand fiction.
[13:28]But unfortunately, they do not throw me a book party.
[13:30]It's just a sort of, you know,
[13:32]you fall in an out of touch with people.
[13:33]And so these people were monumental importance
[13:36]at a very key point in my life.
[13:39]And it's just like, I will always think of them as mensures.
[13:42]But, you know, you just sort of lose touch over time.
[13:45]Unfortunately.
[13:46]Excellent advice.
[13:47]Yes.
[13:49]We all, my life would not be the same with, oh my gosh.
[13:52]So what is it like now that after all of these iterations
[13:56]of this book to have it finally be what it is and come out
[13:59]and all that surreal?
[14:01]I kind of forget that I wrote it.
[14:03]To be honest, I'm a type of writer
[14:05]that just writes and moves on.
[14:07]And so I have to remind myself from time to time
[14:10]that I actually wrote, it was published
[14:12]because now I'm sort of immersed in this next book.
[14:15]I gave myself a week between, maybe it was like,
[14:18]between when I submitted the final copy
[14:21]to my editor at Echo, Sarah Birmingham.
[14:24]And when I started something new,
[14:26]and I think in those two weeks,
[14:27]I was just really sort of restless to go,
[14:29]what do I do?
[14:30]What do I do?
[14:31]I need something to work on.
[14:32]And, you know, I had my children at three
[14:34]and 15 months and, you know,
[14:37]I got plenty to do.
[14:38]There's still this part of me that was feeling very restless.
[14:41]And so two weeks after I submitted that,
[14:43]I started this new project.
[14:45]Well, that was so, tell me more about that.
[14:48]The title I'm forgetting now,
[14:50]I was in Polish's marketplace.
[14:52]It's something that a bomb, something.
[14:53]This book is called a bomb place close to the heart.
[14:56]And it's set in 1917 in Palo Alto, California,
[15:00]a strange place to set a book.
[15:02]But in 1917 and in the early 1910s,
[15:06]a lot of Indian revolutionaries found their way
[15:09]to California.
[15:10]Some of them were farm hands in the Central Valley.
[15:13]And some of them were intellectuals
[15:16]who gravitated towards the campuses of Stanford
[15:18]and UC Berkeley.
[15:20]And they were just, you know, as one does,
[15:22]plotting to overthrow the British Empire.
[15:24]But a lot of these men and they were all men
[15:26]became fell in love with American women,
[15:29]with white students on these campuses.
[15:31]And many of them married, which is remarkable
[15:33]for many reasons.
[15:34]One, interracial was not legal in all 50 states.
[15:37]Two, this was a time of great anti-Asian sentiment.
[15:40]So marrying across racial lines
[15:42]and especially marrying an Asian man can really
[15:45]not only get you in social trouble,
[15:47]but as subsequent laws would prove,
[15:50]it would actually, they were at risk
[15:52]of losing their American citizenship by marrying an Indian man.
[15:55]So these women who would themselves
[15:58]showing the revolutionary movements, you know,
[16:01]love day great risk.
[16:03]And I remember reading about this,
[16:05]and this is like really heavy material.
[16:08]And they were like British spies who came in,
[16:10]trying to track these men down.
[16:12]And ultimately, after the US entered World War I,
[16:15]many of them were branded as traders
[16:17]because being against the British
[16:19]venture against the Allies and World War II.
[16:21]So they were branded as German spies.
[16:23]And so they were rounded up and a lot of them were deported.
[16:26]And so the book follows an Indian revolutionary
[16:29]and the woman who falls in love with from Palo Alto
[16:32]and as they are forced to escape falls
[16:34]and from Palo Alto to New York City and beyond during this.
[16:38]I think this period of, to me, great interest
[16:41]and great intrigue that I don't think many people
[16:44]really know about.
[16:44]There are a lot of stories in this time.
[16:46]And I'm just so excited to be able to tell
[16:49]a little one that's very interesting part of American history.
[16:54]Wow, it's so great.
[16:55]Oh my gosh, can't wait to read it.
[16:57]What advice did you have for aspiring authors?
[16:59]I think, you know, this is not, you know, very unique advice,
[17:04]but everything boils down to an interesting amalgamation
[17:09]of luck and persistence.
[17:11]And, you know, there's nothing we can control
[17:12]about luck, luck is luck.
[17:14]But the amount that my writing career
[17:17]that has come down to just sheer willpower
[17:19]and persistence is actually astounding.
[17:22]And so I think if you're at the very beginning,
[17:24]you know, there's going to be a lot of failure.
[17:26]There's going to be a lot of projection.
[17:28]And if you truly believe in what you're writing
[17:31]and what you're working on, all you could do
[17:33]is keep submitting and keep trying
[17:35]and keep sort of like irrationally putting yourself out there
[17:38]and believing in the value of your work.
[17:41]Because there's many opportunities to put,
[17:42]and in fact, putting is the easiest path.
[17:45]But if there's truly something in there that you believe in,
[17:48]then it's just going to come down to sheer tenacity
[17:52]and grit, all the things, you know,
[17:54]apparent or you know, mentor figures have told us
[17:57]it's important, it's actually true.
[17:59]Like you just have to be working hard and trying.
[18:01]I hate when my mom is right.
[18:03]No, isn't it annoying?
[18:05]No, it's just like, I'm just like working hard.
[18:09]I was totally just saying to someone,
[18:12]like I hear myself giving my kids the same advice
[18:15]that my mom gave me and I was like,
[18:16]but I didn't like that, you know,
[18:17]but I raised against that advisor.
[18:19]I never thought that was good.
[18:20]And now like that's what I'm using.
[18:21]You know, can I not come up with anything else?
[18:23]Pathetic, totally pathetic.
[18:25]But there you have it.
[18:28]It's timeless.
[18:29]I have timeless advice.
[18:31]Oh, well, well, thank you so much.
[18:33]Thank you for coming on mom's time to read bugs.
[18:35]Thanks for giving me this whole background.
[18:37]I'm totally fascinated.
[18:38]I feel like you are going to continue to find
[18:40]all these amazing little stories
[18:41]and the excitement you have over them is really palpable.
[18:44]So that's, it's great.
[18:46]It's really awesome.
[18:47]So congratulations on your book.
[18:49]And I can't wait to follow along with your career.
[18:52]Thanks so much, City.
[18:54]All right, take care.
[18:55]Thank you.
[18:56]Okay, bye bye.
[18:58]Thanks for listening to this episode
[19:00]of Mom's Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[19:01]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at zebiowinds
[19:05]and at mom's don't have time to read books.
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[19:13]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan in fact,
[19:15]texture sound for the sound editing.
[19:17]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions
[19:19]for providing this fantastic intro and out trim music.