The Lunchbox

Fruit on banana leaves in Kolkata

Mainstream cinema is about people running toward socially prescribed endings. Parallel cinema is about people running toward beginnings of their own choosing. Compare the endings of DDLJ (1995) and Dor (2006): both feature women running down station platforms to catch trains, but the futures they run toward could not be more different.  The Lunchbox (2013), directed by Ritesh Batra and set in Mumbai, is a gem of the parallel cinema scene, and accessible to newcomers to Indian cinema. 

Snacks in Lucknow

Ila (Nimrat Kaur), an unloved wife in Mumbai, sends her husband his lunch in a tiffin every day. She sends her culinary devotion via Mumbai’s extraordinary tiffin transport system of Dabbawallas, which boasts an accuracy rate most delivery services can only dream of. However, on this particular day the tiffin reaches the desk of Saajan Fernandes (Irrfan Khan) an ornery widower on the verge of retirement. They strike up an unlikely conversation through notes enclosed in the tiffin, and the story develops from there. Food becomes the sometimes heavy-handed metaphor- Ila feeds Saajan, Saajan feeds Shaikh (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), Auntie feeds her husband, Shaikh feeds his bride Mehrunnisa (Shruti Bapna). When Ila sends Saajan an empty tiffin, she is making an angry point of her own emotional hunger. 

There is a lot of hunger in this film, which is as much about loneliness as love. Khan's widower Saajan is isolation personified, but the marriages of all three female characters are also ending, due to ill health, death, or infidelity: Ila, Auntie-ji, who lives one floor up and who is never seen, only heard, and Ila's mother. All three are facing life without the companionship and support marriage is meant to guarantee; loneliness can creep up on all of us without warning. The counterweight to this melancholy is provided by the marriage of Shaikh to Meherinusa and the budding affection between Ila and Saajan. Love offers no permanent solutions, but without the hope it offers, what do we have? The suicide early in this film suggests we have nothing.

Guavas, cauliflowers & cabbages in Nishat Ganj, Lucknow

Given this, Saajan's choice to chase Ila is unsurprising. That said, the ambiguity of the ending struck my mother and sister, who watched the film before I did. However parallel this film, it was unsurprising to me- it would be highly unusual for an Indian film to end with a married woman leaving her husband and taking up with an older man of a different faith in a different country. The ambiguity allows different viewers to imagine individually acceptable endings, while also avoiding anything cloyingly sweet or vulgar. 

The only thing I love more than parallel cinema is food, and contemplating this post, I am struck by how many of my memories of India revolve around meals shared, discussed, organized, cooked, and enjoyed. I remember the spicy soups I ate with my friend Jyoti in her cozy dining room and the sangria I drank with Jamiesista, the masaala chai I drank in the mornings after my long walks through the Himalayan foothills, the grilled cheese and tomato soup I made for my friend Vaidehi’s birthday and the chocolate cake my friend Aisha prepared for mine. I remember foods I ate off steel plates on mud floors, in restaurants with white table cloths, around kitchen tables, and on worn stone steps. I remember the people I ate with, the conversations we shared, the person I thought I was. Food is spiritual, eating or abstaining religious ritual. Small wonder it flavors our memories.  

Vegetables for sale in Lucknow

Food in South Asia varies from region to region, as it does everywhere else, but food ways also vary by gender, caste, religion, economics, and circumstances. Women in some parts of India may fast for their husband’s continued health on Tuesday; some sadhus fast for weeks. Muslims fast for Ramadan, unless ill, travelling, menstruating, pregnant, nursing. Some Brahmins eat fish or mutton, others do not. Some vegetarians don’t eat onions, eggs, garlic. Caste-based purity hierarchies meant (can still mean) that members of some castes can give to or receive water from some castes, but not others. City dwellers may not maintain the same food ways as relatives in a village. I was welcome in the kitchen in my Sunni host family in Lucknow and upper-middle class host family in Kolkata, but was shooed out with horrified gasps from the kitchen of my Brahmin host family in Naukuchiyatal.  

The most accessible guide to the complexity of South Asian food and food ways I have read is Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors by Lizzie Collingham. Collingham charts the changing development of food in South Asia, from its Ayurvedic roots through the arrival of Arab, Central Asian, East Asian, and European traders and colonizers, highlighting the role each group has played in the development of foods now considered “quintessentially Indian”.  The chapters about what the British ate in India dragged on- there are only so many ways to say that British food is not very good, and it is not exactly a new thesis. However, the chapter devoted to chai is fascinating; I knew the British encouraged tea production and consumption in India, but never before knew how or why. Collingham also explains Ayurvedic medicine in a way I finally understood, and made 16^th and 17^th century geopolitics compelling reading. I suspect the pictures and recipes helped. The best and most readable discussion of the impacts of urbanization on food ways in India is "Dining Out in Bombay", by Frank F. Conlon.

My mother and sister requested cultural explanations. Although not an exhaustive list, here are some high points:

The necklace Ila removes and leaves by her nightstand while reflecting on the suicide of another woman is called a mangala sutra (spelled as one or two words). These necklaces are tied around a bride's neck as one of the wedding ceremonies. Ila also removes her bangles, which also mark her as a married woman.

Saajan Fernandes is a Christian- his Portuguese name, and the fact that his wife has been buried in a cemetery make this clear.

Ila's apartment includes a washing machine, which marks them as middle-class. They do not, however, have a cook, which suggests they are not upper-middle class.

I look forward to the day when the life of a Mumbai tiffin man is also the subject of a film.  You can bet that film will fall under the umbrella of ‘parallel cinema’.

Film: The Lunchbox (2013)
Director: Ritesh Batra
Writers: Ritesh Batra, Vasan Bala
Runtime: 105 minutes
Country: India
Language: Hindi

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