The Potluck Where Everyone Brought Rice
Nine families, nine containers, one lesson in communication.
There is a specific silence that falls when the ninth container of rice is opened at a nine family potluck. I have heard it. It sounds like an entire housing society recalculating its life choices at the same moment.
Let me back up.
Our building is the kind of place where people live one wall apart for years while knowing precisely nothing about each other. We nodded in elevators. We signed for each other's parcels. Once, during a water shortage, we coordinated bucket logistics with the intimacy of a military operation, and then went straight back to nodding. Building C, Shanti Enclave. Forty flats, four hundred nods a day.
Then Mrs. D'Souza from the fourth floor, newly retired and dangerously energetic, typed the message that changed our lives: "TERRACE POTLUCK SATURDAY 7:30!! Everyone bring one dish that goes with everything!!"
Two exclamation marks. No sign-up sheet. No coordination of any kind. A free people, trusted to self-organize.
Now, examine that phrase the way nine separate households independently examined it: a dish that goes with everything. What goes with everything? Not paneer, paneer is a commitment. Not chicken, half the building goes vegetarian on Saturdays. Not salad, salad goes with nothing, salad is a garnish with ambition. There is exactly one food on this earth that goes with everything, and nine families arrived at it the way nine separate mathematicians will arrive at the same proof.
Rice.
Saturday, 7:30. The terrace looked genuinely beautiful. Somebody had strung up fairy lights left over from a Diwali box. Plastic chairs stood in a hopeful circle. A folding table waited under a bedsheet that had been promoted, for one night, to tablecloth.
The containers arrived like characters in a play whose script none of us had read.
The Iyers brought lemon rice, bright yellow, glistening with curry leaves. Lovely. The Fernandes family brought vegetable fried rice, soy-dark and full of confidence. Interesting, we murmured. Mrs. Bhalla brought jeera rice. A pattern was forming... but nobody dared name it out loud. The Kulkarnis unveiled a vegetable pulao that seemed, even under its own lid, to be apologizing. The Reddys brought ghee rice. The Shahs brought curd rice with pomegranate scattered on top, which is at least a costume change. Flat 9 produced a vegetable biryani, which had ambition, I will give it that.
My own contribution, and I want the record to show I felt sophisticated while making it, was saffron rice.
And then Mr. Wagle from the third floor set down a steel dabba held shut with a rubber band, and inside it was plain steamed white rice... and the silence I mentioned earlier came down over the terrace of Building C like a lid.
Nine containers. Nine kinds of rice. Not one dal. Not one sabzi. Not a single curry within a hundred meters.
Somewhere below us a dog barked... and I swear it sounded sarcastic.
Mrs. D'Souza stood over the table with the expression of a general reviewing troops who had all shown up with the same leg. A six year old from the second floor surveyed the entire spread and asked, at devastating volume, "But where is the FOOD?"
That did it. Mr. Fernandes broke first, a wheezing, helpless laugh that folded him over a plastic chair, and it jumped from person to person like current through wet wire. Mrs. Iyer laughed until she had to sit down. Mrs. Bhalla took photographs of the table "for evidence." Forty people who had never exchanged more than nods stood under borrowed fairy lights and howled at nine containers of rice.
And then something better than the laughing happened: the potluck became a relay.
Mrs. Iyer sent her son down for pickle, three kinds. The Shahs produced papads and a lighter, and papad roasting became a spectator sport with commentary. Mr. Reddy vanished and returned with a pressure cooker, and fifteen minutes later the whistle of dal being rescued echoed up the stairwell like a train announcing itself. Somebody fried eggs for the non-vegetarians. Teenagers were dispatched into the night for curd, chips, and, mysteriously, one bottle of ketchup that nobody admitted to requesting and everybody used.
It was, and I am not grading on a curve here, the best meal that terrace has ever seen.
Around nine o'clock, when everyone had settled into the universal lean of the well-fed, Mr. Wagle spoke.
He is seventy-four, third floor, and his wife Meena had died in the spring. We all knew this the way buildings know things, which is to say... completely and silently.
"I want to apologize for my rice," he said, quietly, to his hands. "Meena did the cooking, all fifty-one years of it. Rice is the only thing I have learned this year. I did not want to come empty handed."
The terrace went still.
Not the earlier silence. A different one, with weight in it.
Mrs. D'Souza, without any ceremony at all, took his dabba, tipped the plain rice onto a big steel plate, and spooned everything over it: dal, pickle, crumbled papad, one heroic fried egg. "Then yours is the base of everything, Mr. Wagle," she said, and handed it back, and that was the end of the discussion and the beginning, I think, of the actual building we live in now.
Nine families reached into nine kitchens for the safest thing they had, and it turned out we were all safe in exactly the same way.
I went home that night and could not sleep. I kept thinking about all those closed doors down every corridor, and how behind each one somebody had stood at a stove hedging their bets, hoping to match, hoping not to stick out... hoping to go with everything. I ended up writing a few clumsy lines about loneliness, how it lives politely one wall away and signs for your parcels. In the morning, instead of deleting them like a sensible adult, I posted them on a community wall for poets, where strangers were considerably kinder to those lines than I had been.
The potluck is annual now. We do not coordinate dishes. That is the rule, and the rule is load-bearing: everyone must bring rice, on purpose, and everything else gets improvised on the night. The joke calcified into ritual, the way the best jokes do. Last year there were fourteen kinds of rice, including one from the new couple in Flat 22 who were warned in advance and thought we were joking. And Mr. Wagle brought kheer, because Mrs. Iyer had spent an entire monsoon teaching him, and when the terrace applauded his dabba he looked up at the fairy lights and blinked a great deal.
The WhatsApp group has been renamed "Nine Kinds of Rice." The elevator nods have become conversations, and the conversations occasionally become dinners, and the teenager who fetched the ketchup that first night just left for engineering college, thanking, in his farewell message to the group, "the rice aunties and uncles."
Mrs. D'Souza still refuses to accept any blame for the phrasing. "I said a dish that goes with everything," she says, chin up, "and that is exactly what everybody brought."
She is right, obviously. It just took one spectacularly failed potluck for us to learn what her phrase was actually describing. Not the food. The people, one wall apart, all that time.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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