Together Hub Community Notes: The Common Pot

Together Hub Community Notes

THIS is Together Hub Community Notes.

The whole thing started when Emeka cooked his last cup of beans. The problem was not the cooking per se, but that was the last food stuff tied to his name (and a bowl of salt). So Emeka poured his beans in his pot with a spoonful of salt and what came out was a lumpy, defeated thing that sat in the bowl like a bad decision. He stared at it. He ate two mouthfuls out of stubbornness. Then he dropped the spoon, pushed the bowl away. 

“Let us do common pot” he said

Rotimi, lying on the other bed with his legs against the wall, did not even look up. "With what?"

"With what everybody has."

Rotimi's legs came off the wall. They started with Seven and moved outward the way a rumour moves through a hostel. Tunde from Nine opened his door already suspicious. When they explained, he disappeared inside and came back with half a cup of crayfish and an onion that had seen better days but was still an onion. Eleven gave pepper. Four gave palm oil. Femi from Six contributed a tin of tomato paste he had been guarding since September and handed it over with the expression of a man releasing something precious into the universe and hoping the universe deserved it.

Bello had nothing. Bello said he would wash the plates.

"All of them?"

"All of them."

He was in.

By the time Chukwudi dragged out the big pot, the one his mother sent that had not been used since resumption, there were eleven boys in the corridor and the collective energy of people who have decided, without deciding, that this afternoon belongs to all of them.

Then Segun appeared from Three with a small hand drum tucked under his arm, sat on an upturned bucket, and began. Softly at first, doom doom doom then finding the groove, shoulders rolling into it. Lanre picked it up immediately, his voice dropping into a low kegite call, the kind that starts in the chest and climbs.

Three boys answered before the line was finished. Then Haruna, who everyone knew was tone-deaf and nobody told, grabbed an empty Fanta bottle and joined from the side, komkom komkom komkomkom, tapping the glass neck with his room key, locked into the rhythm like he had rehearsed it, like they had all rehearsed it. The corridor became something else.

Boys who were cooking stirred the pot to the beat. Bello washed rice the way you do chores when there is music. Two boys sat on the floor picking beans and arguing about nothing important with the ease of people who have nowhere else to be and are grateful for it. Someone spilled water. Someone laughed. The drum did not stop.

The smell hit B Block around the second hour. Two boys appeared at the corridor entrance wearing the careful, casual faces of people who were absolutely there for the food. Rotimi pointed at the pot without looking at them. "Go and find a plate."

They found a plate.

When it was ready, nobody served themselves first. The pot sat in the middle of the circle, and they went in together, everyone's spoon finding the rice at the same moment, someone's elbow bumping someone else's arm, the drum finally quiet, the bottle still, the corridor holding the particular peace that follows something shared.

Segun set down the drum and picked up a plate.

Bello, true to his word, washed every plate after.

The fresher from Block B came back the following Saturday without being invited. He brought a full cup of crayfish and learned Segun's name before he sat down.

That is how it begins. That is always how it begins in Terahdi Hall.