On a regular Saturday I wake at ten. Sometimes eleven. This is, I’m reliably informed by my friends who have toddlers, a moral failing and certainly a privilege. A luxury, I would say. While we don’t have children, what we have is a Saturday morning that begins whenever my husband decides to wake me, which is easily my favourite part of the day.

We may have breakfast. We may not. More often I’ll ask him to drop me at the cafe down the road, the one that does a properly strong roast and has a Gregg’s right next door. I tell myself I am going there to write my novel. I order the coffee. Then I go next door and acquire a sausage roll (and possibly a bacon and cheese wrap) because a strong roast on an empty stomach is a young person’s game, and I am no longer that.

And then I write. Or, more honestly, I sit with the laptop open at an angle that implies I’m writing. And this is the second favourite part of my day, where I watch people coming in and going out of the cafe—the solo ones, the couples in their sweatshirts and leggings, the families. And always, somewhere, a child mid-performance of a dance, a monologue, an interpretive piece about a broken crayon for an audience of no one, or just their mother, or of everyone. Children do not distinguish. I could watch that all day and I frequently do.

In fairness, some writing does happen. Longhand in the notebook, because my laptop is fourteen years old and dies the instant it is lifted from a flat surface, so it must be handled like an unexploded device. And then, after I’ve pushed myself painfully through two paragraphs of an unfinished piece, my stomach interrupts the flow to remind me of the panta bhaat sitting in the fridge at home, cold and patient and fermenting quietly into its best self, and no sentence I have ever been capable of writing has managed to compete with that.

So I text my husband. He comes. I could walk (it isn’t far) but the laptop weighs roughly what a laptop weighed in 2012 and I have made my peace with choosing my husband to drive me around over my step count.

Lunch is the event of the day. My third favourite. Briefly, it competes with the second.

Let me explain panta bhaat. You take leftover boiled rice, cover it with cold water, and leave it in the refrigerator overnight to ferment. That’s it. That is the dish. By the next day the rice has gone faintly sour and soft, and the water it’s sitting in has become something between a meal and a drink. You loosen it further with a few ice cubs and a few generous dollops of ice-cold Greek yogurt (unflavoured) until it’s properly slurpable, then finish it with a pinch of salt, raw chopped red onion, chopped coriander, slit green chillies, and a drizzle of mustard oil. You eat it cold, with your fingers, off a wide plate.

I’m aware of how this reads to non-Bengalis. Or some non-Indians even. Bear with me.

Panta bhaat is farmer’s food. Labourer’s food. It is what you ate before you went out to work a paddy field in heat that actively wanted you dead. The overnight ferment nudges the iron in the rice into something your body can actually use, the cold water keeps you upright ..and cool, mustard oil to zing you awake, the rest for flavour, and none of it wastes a single grain of yesterday’s cooking, because rice is not a thing South Asian folks waste. For most of its long life it has been the food of the poor, which is another way of saying it is the food that kept everyone alive, which is another way of saying it is now the food we are all helplessly sentimental about. Multiple times a year during furious summer months, Bengalis everywhere will suddenly soak rice, and eat it with balls of mashed potatoes and fried fish, and feel, for the length of one meal, held by their grandmothers. Peasant food promoted to nostalgia which is the most Bengali career trajectory that can be thought of.

With the heat wave in England this year, I’ve been soaking rice.

On top of mine goes aloor chokha or those balls of mashed potatoes mentioned above. I boil potatoes and mash them (with my fingers, always my fingers because a fork, for this, is for cowards) through caramelised onions, green chillies, turmeric, garlic, salt, and whatever else the pantry feels like contributing that afternoon, because chokha is less a recipe more a mood. I roll it into two fat balls and set one on each plate of panta bhaat like small pale planets in the corner of a sea of white, milky stars. My husband, meanwhile, throws together a quick sauté of mushrooms and peas or he could choose to cook some prawns in chilies and garlic. We drown the lot in lemon and we call it, without a trace of irony, a feast.

The dangerous part is what comes after panta bhaat. Because a plate of cold fermented rice at the peak of afternoon heat on a weekend is roughly like general anaesthetic to a human body. It gently, lovingly, switches you off at the mains. My husband simply accepts this. He lies down like a felled tree and is asleep before I’ve cleared the plates, and looks obscenely peaceful.

I wage war instead. I do not take the afternoon nap. The afternoon nap is fatal and I have learned this the hard, drooling way. You lie down for twenty minutes and you resurface at seven in the evening with the day gone, zero writing done (the chapter still remains a list of bullet points) and your mouth tasting of regret, stale iron and onions.

So I make myself write. or I think about writing—which counts—or I sit at my writing desk and fight to keep my head from lolling and this is precisely when the ambitious thoughts show up where I think about bending the genres I’m in until it makes a noise it isn’t supposed to make. I think about starting something severely, gloriously, unmarketably experimental, the sort of thing that is published by the most prestigiously niche publisher and gets called “brave” by the two people who finish it. I get far into these thoughts and lately some of them have even hardened into sentences.

If I manage to stay awake, I make myself a strong coffee at the helm of night because I know dinner will be a rerun and because I have told myself, with a completely straight face, that there is still Real Work to be done tonight on my current manuscript. I chase it until my eyes give out and when my eyes give out I make the solemn, sincere resolution that tomorrow, Sunday, I will rise early and write while the world is still hazy and clothed in cotton-wrapped silence.

Reader, I wake at ten. Sometimes eleven.

Happy writing!

Amrita

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I am at that classic crossroads where I have finished one project and while in the doldrums that follow, I am unable to rest my mind. So now I have taken up five projects.

You haven’t misread that. Five. I said FIVE.

But they’re not all futile and my ADHD brain (self-diagnosed, I must mention) has a plan. I will make a separate list for all June Writerly Things like the one I made for the month of May. I realise that May was also a lot about complaining about my writing workload. But you were so warned.

So today is just about WIPs.

Half Written is still in the query trenches, and since a couple of fulls have only very recently been sent out, I imagine it will be in the trenches for quite a while. Progress on the now-primary WIP, an upmarket speculative fiction called All Our Goddesses is full steam ahead and I’m not stopping till I get it into the hands of beta readers. There is a third novel-in-progress people (see I told you, I was insane), which is a coming-of-age story, but all I’ve done with that is come up with a two-paragraph summary and the title Here Be Tadpoles (a working title, people, don’t scold me, I will cry). My short story The Gifter is now being peddled around to literary journals in the hopes of finding a loving home. The other short story My Brother, Dara is still unfinished and way beyond any word count socially acceptable. I could turn it into a chapbook if I had the skill. But I don’t. I do realise I have ignored my shorts writing skill a bit, since the last short story I released was Captain Asterix over a year ago (!!!). The novel has clearly taken up all my time.

But if you think I find the paragraph above exhausting to me (I mean, to an extent I did release a sigh while reading through it), then you’d be mostly wrong.

Because this is what I want.

I have recently discovered…no, wrong…realised that I am only capable of writing difficult stories. So naturally, I changed all my social media taglines to reflect this truth. I want to write something cozy, lovely jubbly, aww-so-cutesy. Maybe in the next life.

But the major project of all, and one that should be of real interest to you, reader, is The Deep List.

I have helped run Oratoria for a bit now, as its Fiction Editor, and while we have struggled to keep the magazine out through the pandemic, we are glad to announce some finance backing that is helping us launch The Deep List. there are more (sooper dooper interesting) plans for Oratoria in the near future, but let’s talk about The Deep List for now.

Oratoria Magazine

Introducing: The Deep List

While running the literary part of the magazine, we identified the need to talk about beautifully poignant and significant works that are constantly being put out by talented authors through independent publishers, small presses and self-publishing routes. These include novels, novellas, poetry collections, graphic novels, and short story collections…

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2 months ago · 2 likes · Oratoria Magazine

We are excited to start featuring debut and established authors who have been published by small presses and indie publishers on a mixed platform of interviews and podcasts, and we will extend the interview features to self-published authors who have put out exceptional work. We feel like coverage on brilliant work from this part of publishing is often thin and simply put, we want to put the spotlight on it. I will write more about The Deep List in detail in the June dispatch of things, but this is one more thing on my list that will quite possibly drive me crazy, which is exactly where I want to be.

For now I’ll add another paragraph to Here Be Tadpoles and call it a night! Unrested, disillusioned, yes, yes, yes.

It’s eleven at night here in England and I wanted a space to write about the day. I should be catching up on sleep. When I looked around for my commonplace journal which would be the most appropriate locale for posts like this—because I don’t use Substack as a daily journal, do I—I couldn’t find it at first. But the when I did, I realised that my tennis elbow wouldn’t let me write anything by hand for now. Or for the next week or two. Which is just great. Somewhere in the background I have YouTube playing on which a writer chats about following Virginia Woolf’s writing routine.

English weather never disappoints. Which is to say, it always impresses with its unreliability. I do like stormy mornings though so I don’t complain too much about days like these, as much as my sun-adoring husband does. For most of the day I have worked on the novel. Not the first one. The first one is in the query trenches getting asphyxiated in the sludge that flows down the sides of the gutter. The second one is pure sunshine, in the rays of which I sit and write and grow stronger like Superman. Superauthor?

I noticed a social media post by a writer I follow who simply asked “Why do you write?” It is rare to come across simple posts from people who do not have followers leading to a decimal point in their leaderboard scores. These posts are usually followed by an army of hashtags, because aren’t we all just mewling for attention online in the hopes that hordes will think what we have to say is simply wonderful. But I thought of the question and I didn’t want to dwell on it too much because like every author active in writing groups and book communities, I have thought of the answer over and over again like a broken record in one corner of my head that I don’t like to visit anymore.

I write because it’s the only way I can make sense of my thoughts.

I used to think this answer was profound. It is true, after all. And it has the exact effect on others as I would want it to have, because they imagine that might be what writing is to them to. Maybe making sense of their thoughts is also why they write. I’ve received a lot of upvotes and likes and quotes and retweets every time I’ve provided this answer: I write because it’s the only way I can make sense of my thoughts.

Seven is the number of voices I have in my head at any random point of time. But sometimes it’s six and sometimes two, but mostly seven. Writing calms them all and scratches them at places that makes them go wheeee. But in the last year while working on the manuscript I have questioned whether that is the only reason I write. It is not.

I think I write for legacy too. It is for me, as it is to many authors, I would imagine, a way to immortalise myself. This is irrespective of specifics such as if I’m publishing my writing or not, if I’m getting traditionally published or pressing send on self-publishing, if I have three readers or three hundred thousand readers. All of that are sweet cherries on top of the basic cake I crave. The basic cake I crave is that my pieces exists. My writing simply exists. Across a few laptops and online repositories, a few literary journals and on handwritten papers scattered throughout the house and in a few of my tote bags. I may read it someday simply because it exists, my future child might, and when I’m gone my brother who comes to help my husband sort my things might read them and think of me.

Ten minutes to midnight. Have to hit Publish before the day turns, otherwise the date in the title will be wrong. Will I be keeping this type of posts up? I don’t know.

Happy writing!

Amrita