By Paul Byrnes
To paraphrase The Naked City, there are eight million lunch boxes in the teeming city of Mumbai; this is the story of one of them. Actually, it’s the story of the one mistake in eight million deliveries: that’s the figure the Dabbawallahs acknowledge as their error rate.
The Dabba who? There are 5000 lunch box couriers on any working day in Mumbai, delivering about 200,000 lunches. They pick up the hot food packed in stainless Steel containers from the worker’s home, deliver it to him/her in the office, still warm, and return the boxes later that day. The system has been working for 120 years in Mumbai and has become famous in American business schools as an example of accuracy in systems. That’s reflected here in a funny scene where the Dabbawallah in question (the lunchbox delivery man) refuses to believe a woman’s complaint that her husband’s lunch box is being delivered to the wrong man.
This lunch box, says Ila (Nimrat Kaur), has not been going to my husband, but to another man who has been eating it. The delivery man (Sadashiv Kondaji Pokarkar) insists that can’t happen. "The Harvard people came here and studied our system. They said we don’t deliver wrong."
The Lunchbox is not about the workings of this wondrous system. It’s about the splendour of two people falling in love without having met, through an epistolary relationship. A sort of 84 Charing Cross Road, with extra pappadams.
Made with love: Nimrat Kaur in The Lunchbox.
Ila tries to reach her distant husband’s heart through his stomach, but it is not working. Her ageing aunty upstairs, with whom she communicates by shouting, offers advice and help with recipes. Her nose is so good she can tell what a dish is missing from one floor up. "One bite of that and he’ll build you a Taj Mahal," cries aunty (Bharati Achrekar), whose face we never see.
There’s a superbly evocative sequence following the lunch boxes as they travel from bicycle to train to bicycle through monsoonal downpours and chaotic traffic, to arrive punctually at the right desk in the right building. Ila’s lunch ends up on the desk of Saajan Fernandes (Irrfan Khan), an older man who has been working for the same department for 35 years, in accounts. A widower, he pays a service to provide his lunch, and it has never been this good. He realises he’s eating another man’s lunch, so he slips a note into the tin when it goes back, complimenting the cook. Ila is at first confused, then charmed. She continues to send lunch to the wrong man, along with a new note each day: at least he appreciates her food.
In his first feature, writer-director Ritesh Batra tells a story that couldn’t happen anywhere else, something that’s hard to do. And he tells it with great poise, the kind of restraint that reflects an Indian storytelling perspective. A married woman communicating her secrets to a stranger? That might be scandalous to some Indians, but there is no direct intimacy here, just the growing sense of two strangers finding a connection. Fernandes, on the verge of retirement, has many grudges against the world. Ila’s cooking, made with love, reawakens his heart. That’s an old idea in movies, but it hardly matters. It is so deftly handled as to be both charming and mouth-watering.
Much of the success comes from these two exceptional actors. Khan, a seasoned and well-known professional, brings a lovely reticence to his character. Kaur, who’s much younger, shows a great gift for comedy, especially in the shouted intimacies with "aunty". She has a quality of stillness too, a repose that tells us a lot about her disappointing marriage. They’re supported well by Nawazuddin Siddiqui as Shaikh, a young man of oily manners who has been chosen to replace Fernandes. He is not what he seems, which is just as well, because Fernandes has no time for outer appearances
The Lunchbox is either a piquant romance or a wise comedy. The director’s confidence with such a delicate story makes it successful as both.
Twitter: @ptbyrnes