Part 1 of 9 · 2 minThe Swap

For four years I ate the same lunch at the same desk at twelve-forty.

Rice, one curry, a boiled egg on Wednesdays. I packed it myself the night before. I am not a good cook. I am a consistent one, which is a different thing, and in a shared pantry with thirty identical steel tiffins, consistency is how you find your own.

On the fourth of March I opened mine and it was not mine.

Same box. Same three tiers, same dented lid, same green rubber ring. But inside was gongura pachadi, and rice with a little ghee poured in a spiral, and a piece of fried fish laid on a square of banana leaf so it would not sweat.

I should have taken it back to the pantry. I ate it standing at the counter like a thief.

It was the best thing I had eaten in four years. That is not an exaggeration I am making now, afterwards, to explain myself. I remember thinking it at the time, with my mouth full, in the fluorescent light: this is the best thing I have eaten in four years, and I do not know whose it is.

I asked around. Nobody had lost a tiffin. Nobody had gained one either — whoever took mine did not complain about the dry rice and the egg, and that stung more than it should have.

The next day it happened again. Sambar, thick, with drumstick cut long. The day after, curd rice with a green chilli split down the middle, the way my mother used to, because a whole chilli makes it bitter and a chopped one makes it violent.

The way my mother used to.

I sat with that for a long time. My mother has been dead eleven years. She was not from here. The split chilli was hers, her mother's, a thing from a village nobody in this office has heard of.

I told myself: it is a common way to do it. Somebody else's mother did it too.

On the seventh day I opened the box and found pulihora, and under the lemon rice, folded small and pressed flat by the weight of the food, a strip of paper with nothing written on it at all.

I want to be honest about what I felt. It was not fear.

It was the feeling of being seen.