The Annual Partners' Dinner

The brief was unusually simple: one table, one hundred and forty seats, and no stage. The client wanted their partners to spend the evening looking at each other rather than at a screen — so we cleared the upper hall entirely, ran a single unbroken table down its length, and lowered every brass lamp until the room read as candlelight.

Service was choreographed in three waves. Twenty-two servers, briefed at four in the afternoon, moved the nine-vessel thali out course by course so that no guest waited and no dish arrived cold. The chokha was finished on coals at the far end of the hall in full view of the table, which is the only piece of theatre we allowed ourselves.

At half past ten the doors to the terrace opened and a shehnai recital carried over the parapet while the city bells rang across Chaukaghat. Guests drifted out with kulhad chai in hand. The last of them left at ten past one.