Writer and historian Nishant Batsha joins Zibby to talk about his debut novel, Mother Ocean Father Nation, which he wrote in tandem with his dissertation on Indian indentured labor in Trinidad and Fiji. Nishant shares how he wrote four different books and pulled parts from each before combining them all and arriving at the story that was eventually published. The two also discuss the advice Nishant received from other writers with PhDs that shaped his career trajectory, how he found his way to academia after a medical emergency in his late teens, and the history at the center of his next book, A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart.