The Job I Took for the Canteen
The work was dull, but the rajma on Thursdays was a calling.
I accepted a full-time job in insurance documentation because of a plate of rajma chawal I ate during the lunch break of my interview. I want to state that plainly, up front, because for six years I told everyone a more respectable version, and I am done lying.
It was 2017. I had two offers. Offer one: a startup with a foosball table, stock options, and a founder who used the word "disrupt" as punctuation. Offer two: Meridian General Insurance, a company so beige that its logo was, and I am not making this up, a slightly darker beige.
The startup interview featured cold brew and a tour of the nap pods. The Meridian interview featured a forty-five minute wait, during which an HR aunty named Pushpa ma'am took pity on me and said the five words that decided my entire professional trajectory:
"Beta, canteen chalo. Thursday hai."
I did not know then what Thursday meant at Meridian. I know now.
Thursday meant Iqbal bhai's rajma.
How do I explain this rajma to you. It was not food, exactly... It was an argument for the existence of a benevolent universe.
The beans had clearly been soaked overnight by someone who loved them. The gravy was dark and patient. There was a ladle of ghee on top that Iqbal bhai administered like a blessing, with a little wrist flick at the end, and the rice was that particular soft steam-heavy rice that tastes like every good Sunday of your childhood at once.
I ate one plate. I went back up for the second half of my interview and answered questions about claims documentation workflows with the serene confidence of a woman who has just seen the face of God.
They offered me eleven percent less than the startup. I said yes on the phone, in the metro... before I could think about it too hard.
My mother told the relatives I had chosen "stability." My professor said it was wise to pick "process maturity over hype." My friends assumed I had negotiated something secret. For years I nodded along to all of it. Only my flatmate knew the truth, because she was there the night I ranked both offers in a notebook, and under Meridian I had written a single word, underlined three times: RAJMA.
Here is what people who take jobs for sensible reasons will never understand: I was never disappointed. The work was dull. Cosmically dull. I once spent nine business days standardizing the abbreviations in a motor claims manual, and the deliverable of that project was a shorter list of abbreviations. But dullness, it turns out, is survivable if there is one fixed point of joy in the week, and mine arrived every Thursday at 12:30 with a wrist flick of ghee.
The canteen was where the actual company lived. Upstairs we were departments. Down there we were just hungry people, and hungry people talk.
It was over rajma that Verma sir from actuarial taught me more about probability than my entire degree. It was over rajma that I found out Pushpa ma'am wrote couplets, proper Urdu couplets, in a diary with a rubber band around it.
And it was over rajma, obviously, that I met Kunal from the Pune office, who was visiting for a compliance audit and stayed at my table forty minutes past his slot because we got into a fight about whether onions belong on top. We have been married three years... Onions do belong on top. He knows this now.
The startup, for the record, shut down in nineteen months. The foosball table was sold on OLX... I checked.
Then, in my fourth year, the memo arrived.
Subject line: "Cafeteria Services Modernization Initiative." Some consultant had done a cost analysis, and Meridian was outsourcing the canteen to a national vendor called, I swear, NutriVend Solutions, whose sample menu included a quinoa khichdi bowl and something described as a "jackfruit experience." Iqbal bhai and his two boys would be "transitioned out."
I read that memo three times, standing up, hands actually shaking. Six years in insurance had taught me exactly one skill: documentation.
So I documented.
I, a woman who had never once raised her hand in a town hall, wrote a four-page appeal with annexures. I collected two hundred and thirty signatures in three days, which at Meridian was unheard of; we could not get thirty people to RSVP for Diwali. Verma sir ran the numbers and proved the savings were marginal once you accounted for attrition risk, because he was petty in a beautiful, actuarial way. Pushpa ma'am contributed a couplet for the cover page. I posted a furious little ode to the rajma on a community wall for poets at 1 a.m., where strangers from three countries commented that I had made them hungry and one of them asked for the canteen's address, which I consider my finest review as a writer.
The turn, though, was not the petition.
The turn was the day I was summoned, mid-campaign, to the seventh floor. I had never been to the seventh floor. I assumed I was being fired, and I remember thinking, with total clarity... worth it.
The Managing Director was a silver-haired man named Mr. Fernandes whom I had seen only in the annual report, smiling next to a pie chart. He had my appeal on his desk, annexures and all.
"You wrote this?" he said.
"Yes, sir."
He was quiet for a second... Then: "Every Thursday, my driver picks up two tiffins from that canteen at 12:15. One for me, one for him. He waits at the side gate so nobody sees. I have eaten Iqbal's rajma in my car, in the parking lot of my own company, for nine years, like a man having an affair." He tapped the appeal. "I could not fight the consultants with a tiffin. You have given me two hundred and thirty signatures and a cost analysis."
The Cafeteria Services Modernization Initiative died in committee that quarter. NutriVend's jackfruit experience was never experienced.
Take the job for the silly reason. The serious reasons will lie to you; the rajma never did.
People love asking about funny reasons for taking a job, usually as an icebreaker, and when I tell mine they laugh and then go quiet, because most of them chose correctly on paper and eat sad desk salads in a role they selected out of pure strategy. Strategy knows your salary band. It does not know you. My silly reason turned out to be a serious one wearing a bib: I was not choosing lunch, I was choosing a place where somebody soaked the beans overnight, and where a hundred strangers put their trays down at the same long tables. Everything I actually value from those years, my husband, my people, the discovery that I will fight when it matters, came up from that canteen like steam.
Iqbal bhai retired last winter, on his own terms, knees before spirit. On his last Thursday, the queue went out the door and down the stairs, and Mr. Fernandes stood in it like everyone else, and when it was finally my turn, Iqbal bhai did the wrist flick with the ghee, looked at me, and said, "Zyada khao, beta. Aaj special hai."
It was the same rajma as always.
That was what made it special. Nine hundred Thursdays, and it never once let anybody down. I have known people, plans, and entire five-year strategies that could not manage even one.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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