Most Ordinary Saturdays: Journal Entry, 13 July 2026
Writing but also everyone should know what Panta Bhaat is
Hello, I’m Amrita, an overfed, undermoisturized, anxiety-ridden, forty-year-old who writes difficult stories. This is my space (let’s go with: personal column)to whine about it. There is no paywall. There never will be. This post has some really good food in it. Please subscribe.
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