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The Lunchbox

‘Kabhi kabhi galat train bhi sahi jagah pahucha deti hai.’

Trains play a lead role in Ritesh Batra’s 2013 film, The Lunchbox. The film opens with a wide shot of the Mumbai locals, which ferry millions across the city daily. These trains, the beating heart of a bustling city, also carry back and forth the famous dabbawallas, who transport hot lunches from homes to offices. Established in 1890, this army of over 5,000 men, dressed in white and wearing traditional Gandhi caps, delivers meals to more than 2,00,000 people daily. Their system is so intricate and accurate that it’s been written about in the New York Times and the Harvard Business Review. Their error ratio is 1 in 6 million. The Lunchbox is the story of what happens when that one dabba ends up at the wrong address.

‘Only connect . . .’ E.M. Forster wrote as the epigraph to his 1910 novel, Howards End. The Lunchbox is about a connection that two people make through food and then through handwritten letters. This is an epistolary romance in a sense, but the word ‘romance’ burdens the delicacy of the relationship between Ila and Saajan. She’s a housewife, trapped in a souring marriage (she suspects her husband is having an affair—he barely notices her but is quick to criticize the lunches she sends him) and stifling domesticity (her world is confined to their small apartment, mainly the kitchen, where she rustles up delectable dishes). Saajan is a widower on the verge of retirement. They are both desperately lonely. The lunchbox that travels between them, ensconced in a dull green tiffin cover, becomes a lifeline for them both. Through it, they probe and prod and imperceptibly alter each other. Something shifts in Ila and Saajan. They decide to demand more of life.

Ritesh, who also wrote the screenplay, tells this story with unforced tenderness. In a city of more than 20 million, fate brings these two people together. The film suggests they are connected by something elemental. So in one scene, Saajan shoos away a fly and it cuts to Ila doing the same. Hindi film music binds them. Saajan commutes on the local train, in which children begging for alms are singing ‘Pardesi Pardesi’ from Raja Hindustani. The shot cuts to the same song playing on the radio in Ila’s house. Later in the film, she is listening to ‘Mera Dil Bhi’ from Saajan, which then seamlessly transitions to the children on the train singing the same song.

Much of Saajan’s life is spent standing, uncomfortably close to strangers, on buses and trains that take him back and forth to a job he has held for thirty-five years—without, as his boss tells us, making a single mistake. At one point, he writes to Ila: ‘When my wife died, she got a horizontal burial plot. I tried to buy a burial plot for myself the other day, and what they offered me was a vertical one. I spend my whole life standing in trains and buses, and now I’ll have to stand even when I’m dead.’ In a quiet, unhurried manner, the film captures the oppressive frenzy of Mumbai. The Lunchbox is a portrait of loneliness, peppered with elegant silences and moments of breath-taking loveliness. In another letter, Saajan writes: ‘I think we forget things if we have no one to tell them to.’

Saajan has a hard and brittle exterior (the office gossip is that he once kicked a cat who was then run over by a bus). Which is perhaps why, in the crowded canteen, he always has his lunch alone. Ila penetrates his armour with her delicious food and her notes, which are clear-eyed and searching. Aslam Shaikh, his junior, penetrates it with relentless good cheer. Played with endearing enthusiasm by Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Aslam is the perfect foil to Saajan. He’s hopeful, sociable and determined to squeeze every ounce of happiness out of his straitened circumstances. The scenes between Aslam and Saajan have a tinge of sweetness that will make you smile. It’s a joy to watch two actors of this calibre play off each other.

But even the more joyful scenes in the film are suffused with sadness. The protagonists are bruised people battling their solitude, which is constantly being underlined by the crowded city. Irrfan’s riveting performance encapsulates this sadness. His eyes are wise and weary. Even when Saajan smiles, you can sense fatigue. Ila, though younger, carries that same burden of joylessness. Nimrat Kaur imbues her with the right balance of dignity and desperation. When Ila writes to Saajan about a woman who committed suicide with her child, you know instantly that Ila is capable of doing the same.

Food is also a character in The Lunchbox. It connects people. Ila’s faceless neighbour Mrs Deshpande (whom we hear but never see), exchanges recipes and spices with her. Aslam feeds Saajan his signature lamb dish. Aslam is Muslim, Saajan is Catholic and Ila is Hindu. But this is never underlined or commented on. The three are bound together by a shared humanity.

The Lunchbox doesn’t tell us what happens to Ila and Saajan. In 2016, I did an interview with Ritesh in which I asked how he imagined their lives turned out. He said he didn’t know. But I do. In my version, Ila and Saajan move to Bhutan—a country that fascinates Ila because of its focus on gross national happiness rather than gross national product.

Bhutan is one of my favourite places on the planet and the fact that it is Ila’s fantasy escape made me like The Lunchbox even more. It is a country of such startling beauty that I can’t imagine anyone could be unhappy there. So I think of Ila and Saajan and Ila’s daughter together, watching the sun set behind the high mountains and savouring Ila’s cooking—especially brinjal, which Saajan insists on calling aubergine.

Ritesh Batra is too sophisticated a storyteller to spin a ‘happily ever after’. But I think Ila and Saajan find a semblance of serenity.

You can watch The Lunchbox on Netflix.