Nisha Susan finds kanji is a fasting food that looks a lot like feasting.

This piece was shortlisted for the Conde Nast Excellence Award for Food Writing, 2019.

Have you ever said someone is as nutty as a fruitcake? It’s a relatively recent Americanism, and one that I have had mixed feelings about for far too long. As mixed as my feelings towards fruitcake. Food-based insults in English, I have noticed, do tend to land rather imperfectly. Take that line that confused me for years — What am I, chopped liver? I get that the speaker is an aggrieved party but I love chopped liver, and have never understood how one could compare its rich, fatty perfection to feeling like your luminousness is being dimmed. Many years ago, I passed by a fancy bakery that had sprung in my Delhi neighbourhood, saw that its name was Whipped and a puritan gasp escaped me. How wrong yet how daring, I thought. Their cakes tasted better because I assumed an evil mind was somewhere churning the butter. Was that the intended effect? Who is to say? But the gastronomic insult that has always and consistently failed for me is one in Malayalam: kanji. As in, “Avan oru kanji aanu/He is a rice gruel.” The picture that is supposed to leap to mind is of a person who is ungenerous, not just with money but also with his imagination, of a grudging narrow life.

I get the insult, sure, in a transactional way but I could never feel that way about kanji. I don’t know what consistent kanji eater could feel that way. My grandfather, for instance, had kanji for dinner quite frequently but never thought of it as anything special, just something hot and familiar and easy to eat. He ate it in a plate (not a bowl) so once most of the rice was spooned up there was — inevitably — direct slurping of the gruel water from the plate. He was self-conscious about it enough to make jokes about it but not self-conscious enough to not slurp. I never heard my grandfather using kanji as an insult but every now and then he would tell this kanji joke:

An old man is excited to get his first invitation to stay at his civil servant son’s home in Thiruvananthapuram. He leaves his village and thinks about all the new and exciting things he would eat at his fancypants son’s house. It is not an easy journey and he is quite exhausted when he arrives late at night. His son welcomes him warmly. The old man sits down for his meal and his daughter-in-law puts down a plate before him. A plate of what she had thought would be comfort food for her elderly father-in-law. And there it was the familiar, detested podi ari kanji with its familiar broken brown rice. Thunderstruck, the old man exclaims at the gruel, “Ambada! You managed to get to Thiruvananthapuram before I did!” The telling of this story had nothing to do with my grandfather’s feelings about kanji of course. It was usually an unsubtle instruction to my much-harassed grandmother that he would not stand to be fed the same things too frequently. Or a subtle instruction to the rest of us that we should not bore other people.

Kanji has never had a chance to bore me because I have only ever had it in two contexts. One. As pazhakanji aka old kanji. My older cousins in Kerala loved it for breakfast so when I was visiting I ate it too. Leftover cooked rice from the day was soaked overnight in water to prevent it from spoiling. The next morning, cool and fermented kanji was eaten with bits and pieces of other leftovers — a small piece of fish, seasoned buttermilk, pickle if you could find any, or a tiny green kanthari chilli. We hung out eating on the kitchen floor gossiping but without heat in the plate or in the story. The day and its troubles were only starting to simmer. Pazhakanji was not a meal to be had at the dining table or one to make any effort for. I was startled to see pazhakanji in a fancy restaurant in Bhubhaneshwar. An irreverent relative of mine has long called pakhal bhaat (as it is known in Orissa) aspirin water. For her, a major fan of all things fried, chatpata and masaledar, pakhal, which is blander than even kanji, must have been unbearable.

The other context I’ve always had kanji in was also perfectly congenial. Every year on Good Friday in Muscat, my parents had kanji for lunch. We may or may not go to church, we may or may not observe Lent, I may or may not have fainted in church but kanji was made. (I lie. I always fainted in church on the one day of the year we went. There is too much standing in church. This is what I would nail to the door as my major and perhaps single proclamation if churchgoing was still part of my life.)