There’s nothing as intimidating as interviewing another journalist. They can tell exactly how prepared you are (or not), how experienced you are (or not), and how nervous you are (I was). But I needn’t have worried: Writer, journalist, and Seattleite Sonora Jha was an excellent interviewee, and a kind conversationalist.

We sat down together in Aamrai, a newish Indian restaurant on Bellevue Avenue in Capitol Hill, to discuss the official American debut of Jha’s first novel, Foreign. Aamrai specializes in food from the Indian state of Maharashtra, where Foreign is set. It’s also just a few blocks away from the only bookstore in America where — for more than a decade — readers could buy the novel.

With its dark wood and cozy golden lighting, Aamrai is a cozy spot tucked a little bit away from the main bustle of Cap Hill. The loud, thrumming music in Marathi and Hindi and the cricket highlights on the TV were a little distracting, but were absolutely on theme.

Foreign follows Katya Misra, a Seattleite and Indian American journalism professor, who is celebrating the publication of her own book in Seattle when she learns her son Kabir has run away from Katya’s parents’ home in India.

A professor herself at Seattle University since 2003, Jha first started writing as a journalist in India.

“Growing up in India, if you’re writing, even as a journalist, there is a huge appreciation for all the kinds of writing,” Jha said. “There’s a huge tradition with fiction writing, in English and in regional languages, so maybe I always had some aspirations, but more like a respect for that.”

Originally from the state of Bihar in northeast India, Jha’s family ultimately settled in Mumbai, in Maharashtra, when she was nine years old. Jha traveled throughout India and Singapore for her work as a journalist, before moving to the United States in 2000 to pursue her PhD in political communications.

On the surface, the protagonist of Foreign is very similar to Jha herself.

“I gave [Katya] the skeletal realities of my life, and then intensified her acerbicness,” Jha said with a laugh. “She’s me gone horribly wrong: If I didn’t control myself, if I didn’t have love in my life, if I didn’t have therapy, I would be her.”

The similarities don’t extend too far, however: Jha’s son never ran away from home, and unlike her author, Katya seems to have no love for India. Meanwhile — at least in terms of cuisine — Indian is Jha’s favorite. 

“I tried to be pretentious for a while and pick others,” Jha said. “But now as I get older I can barely go four days without eating Indian food.”

Aamrai’s menu isn’t huge, and the options for vegetarian food are quite limited, but what they have is excellent. We went with the Karivepaku chicken, goat biryani, and spicy Nagpuri Saoji chicken at a level three spicy out of five, which Jha handled with ease but was about the limit of what I could enjoy.

When Katya follows Kabir to the (fictional) village of Dhanpur in Vidarbha — where Kabir has gone in search of the father he never knew — they are drawn into the lives of a family of farmers who take them in: Gayatri and Bajirao Andhale, and their youngest daughter, Meera.

Originally published in India in 2013, Foreign was borne from Jha’s experience covering the rural farmer suicide crisis in India as a journalist. Between 1995 and 2022, it’s estimated that over 95,000 farmers died of suicide in the state of Maharashstra alone, approximately 2.5 times the national average.

In the early 2000s, rural farmers in India were pushed to adopt Bt cotton, a genetically modified strain of cotton produced by the company Monsanto, allegedly due to its resistance to cotton bollworms and other pests. But because the strain is patented, farmers had to buy the expensive seeds every year rather than use what they grow.

Meanwhile, the same mutation that made the cotton resistant to pests made it much more vulnerable to fluctuations in water supply. Many rural farmers rely on rainfall, rather than irrigation, for their crops. As climate change worsens and drought becomes more common, these factors have created the perfect storm for crushing financial devastation.

Debt can drive thousands of Indian farmers every year to suicide, and many — often wrongly — believe that the government will provide restitution to and support their families.

“I interviewed all these farmers, especially women farmers, who were widows. And I was just stunned at how intense this story was, it’s such a huge global story, and there was no journalism around it,” Jha said.

Jha’s focus on how the crisis impacts women is paramount throughout the novel, exploring how their debt hurts Gayatri, Meera and other wives, widows, and daughters who are often marginalized when it comes to the story of the farmer suicides. That includes the threat of sexual violence, which some loansharks use to terrorize indebted families.

“These women were telling me these things, but they were saying, ‘Don’t put this in the story, don’t write about this,’” Jha said. “So I decided to write it as fiction.”