Your grandmother makes dahi every night and always keeps a spoonful for tomorrow. You cannot start a batch without yesterday's batch. She says her mother taught her the same way. Somewhere back there, the first curd needed a warm corner and a pot left too long — something accidental — and after that the pot fed itself. Nobody in the kitchen thinks about the first accident. They just keep the spoonful going.
Her mango pickle works the same way. The recipe everyone in the family copies is not the recipe she was trying to make. The first jar sat too long in the sun and turned sharper than she planned, and it tasted better that way. Now every summer the jars must sit exactly that long. Ask her when she chose the number of days and she will say it was always like this.
Every balcony on your floor has a tulsi plant. Ask anyone where theirs came from and they will point to the next door balcony. Somewhere on the floor there was a first pot. Nobody knows which one anymore.
There is a mango tree in the corner of your colony that nobody planted. A bird dropped a seed years ago and the tree grew, and now every summer children climb it and aunties argue about whose branch hangs over whose wall. Ask who planted it and everyone will look at you oddly. The tree was always there.
A cat waits outside your building every evening at six, and someone on the floor always feeds it. The cat comes because someone feeds it. Someone feeds it because the cat comes. Ask who left the first bowl of milk and nobody can tell you.
The dahi, the pickle, the tulsi cuttings, the mango tree, the cat at six — each one looks chicken-and-egg now. Yesterday's curd needs today's milk. Every tulsi came from the pot next door. The tree bears fruit because it bears fruit. The cat comes because someone feeds it, and someone feeds it because the cat comes.
They look stuck that way until something from outside pushes once — or one accident catches — and then the loop runs and forgets how it started. That forgetting is how you know it took. If everyone can still name the first push, the loop is probably not running yet.