I number myself among the guests who have an idea about Jia Li's riddle. While we wait for others to hazard a guess, perhaps I should explain the answer to my own riddle in Rachana's absence.

The simple solution to the clue-line verse is to spy that the first letter of each line forms an acrostic: RIDDLE. The more difficult solution is to note the frequency of the letters in each line. For example the last line contains a preponderance of E's, the line before it was laced with L's, and the two before it were dominated by D's, and so forth.