The appraisal letter said fourteen per cent, effective next month. By dinner, Nikhil had spent it three times — once on a better flat, once on the long-postponed Ladakh trip, and once, vaguely, on “investing more.” The first two came with pictures. The third one never does.
It had happened before. His last raise had arrived just like this, full of plans — and dissolved so smoothly into slightly longer cab rides and slightly nicer dinners that today he could not point to a single thing it had become.
That weekend he was home in Kolhapur for his mother's birthday. Saturday morning found him in the kitchen doorway, watching his grandmother do something he had seen ten thousand times without once seeing it. Before measuring rice for lunch, she took one fistful from the fresh measure and dropped it into an old Dalda tin on the shelf. Then she cooked what remained.
“Aaji. Why does the tin get its rice first?”
“The tin eats first,” she said, as if that explained everything. “One fist from every measure, before the pot sees it. My mother did it, and hers. Once the rice is cooked, nobody misses a fistful. But try taking it back after the plates are served.”
He looked at the tin, nearly full. “And when the house was full? When there were eleven of you eating?”
“Bigger pot, more measures. More measures, more fistfuls.” She levelled the rice with one practised shake. “The fist stays the same size, beta. It just eats more often when the kitchen grows.”
The tin filled every few months, she told him. Most years it became the rice they carried to the temple. One year — a bad one, long before Nikhil — it was simply dinner.
Sunday night, back in Pune, he opened his banking app the way you open a drawer whose contents you already know. There was his SIP — a careful, proud number, chosen three years ago when his salary was a smaller thing. Two raises had come and gone since. The number had not moved.
So, before the new salary could arrive and learn its habits, he did what the kitchen had taught him. He increased the SIP — one firm fistful from the fresh measure, moved on salary day, before the pot sees it. And he set a reminder for appraisal week, every year, with a rule his grandmother never needed to write down: when the pot grows, the fist eats more often.
The months since have been unremarkable, which is the point. You cannot miss rice that never reached the pot.
But on a shelf inside his month, quietly, a tin is filling.