‘The Lunchbox’ - Review
“Sometimes even the wrong train can take us to the right station.”
The Lunchbox turned 10 last year.
Only moments after Ritesh Batra's first film, The Lunchbox, hit theaters that Indian viewers were sure India could win the Oscar for Best Foreign Film that year. Having pinned all our hopes of cinematic glory on the shoulders of the late Bollywood actor Irrfan’s nuanced performance (he plays one of the protagonists in the film), the nation felt a sharp betrayal when the the Film Federation of India (FFI) decided to send the Gujarati film The Good Road instead.
“How do they even nominate a film without an American distributor...” tweeted Guneet Monga, one of the producers of the film, highlighting the international support for The Lunchbox that The Good Road lacked.
In retrospect, the outrage was a tad bit dramatic for just a romantic film, but then again that is the power of cinema, when a piece of art deeply resonates with audiences around the world, its ownership extends beyond the filmmakers, to the fans. The Lunchbox is precisely that kind of film, one that captures the hearts of its viewers.
The Lunchbox tells the story of a mistaken lunch delivery that sparks a relationship between a young housewife and an older man through an exchange of notes in a lunchbox. The plot relies heavily, not unlike the city of Mumbai, on the dabbawallas.
The word dabba means lunchbox. The word can be used to describe any kind of box, but is often specifically the round metallic stackable containers used to carry hot meals. A dabbawalla is a worker who transports these hot lunches from homes or caterers or restaurants to people at offices in Mumbai. This system, over a century old, involves 5,000 self-managed workers delivering over 130,000 lunches six days a week with exceptional accuracy. They rely on trains, bicycles, and handcarts to navigate the city without modern technology. Despite facing challenges like monsoons, floods, and even terrorist attacks, mistakes by dabbawallas are extremely rare.
Sajaan Fernandez (Irrfan Khan) catching a whiff of Ila’s delectable home cooked food
It's a well-known fact: the dabbawalas of Mumbai rarely make mistakes. However, exceptions arise in exceptional movies featuring the late actor Irrfan. Known for his work in both Hollywood blockbusters like Life of Pi, Slumdog Millionaire, and Jurassic World, as well as Bollywood hits such as Piku, Irrfan decided to drop his last name Khan and add an additional 'r' to his first name, emphasizing his desire to be recognized for his work rather than his background.
Irrfan's passing in 2020 due to neuroendocrine cancer left a profound impact on the nation, perhaps even greater than the pandemic itself. His absence still leaves many of us in disbelief, yearning for his return to the big screen, where he captivated audiences with his impeccable comic timing and casual dialogue delivery. That's Irrfan for you.
In The Lunchbox, Irrfan portrays Mr. Saajan Fernandez, a perpetually irritable widower on the brink of retirement from his accounting job. He lives a solitary life, isolated and lonely, often unkind to the neighborhood children. Saajan travels, works, and eats alone, seemingly disconnected from humanity.
When tasked with training his replacement, Aslam Sheikh (played by Nawazuddin Siddique), Saajan instinctively avoids Aslam's sincere efforts to learn from him. The only bright spot in Saajan's routine is the lunchbox mistakenly delivered to him.
The dabba is lovingly prepared by another solitary soul Ila Singh (played by Nimrat Kaur) who puts her heart into every dish, hoping to rekindle her marriage, one morsel at a time. Ila is a young homemaker living in Mumbai with her emotionally-distant husband Rajeev and their school-going daughter. Ila devotes most of her day searching for, listening for, discovering and creating recipes to cook for her husband’s dabba.
Ila does all this work — not because she aspires to be a successful chef some day, nor does she exert herself because someone is generously compensating her. Instead, she longs for a simple compliment, a moment of attention, a flicker of validation from her husband.
Her life is overwhelmingly centered around food and the kitchen to the extent that she is seen eagerly anticipating the arrival of the dabbawalla at her doorstep in the evening, awaiting the moment when she can open the lunchbox to ascertain Rajeev’s satisfaction with his meal. There is a profound moment early on in the film when Ila finds the lunchbox to be empty, feeling a small victory in her efforts to reconnect with her husband.
So little Ila lives for — at that point she doesn’t realize.
Rajeev, her husband, on the other hand does not give food much thought at all. Later that night, as Ila inquires about the food to Rajeev, she realizes that the dabba she had prepared for Rajeev had been mistakenly eaten by someone else. A very distraught Deshpande Aunty (Ila’s friendly neighbor) remarks “Yesterday Rajeev ate somebody else's lunch, and he didn't even realize, let him realize today!”
But even as Ila and Sajaan’s acquaintance turns into a full-blown platonic relationship one letter at a time, Rajeev still remains indifferent to what he eats.
For Ila, food is a love language. It involves thought and effort. Serving her husband is an act of care for her. For Rajeev however, it is merely an act of satisfying a biological need of the body at specific times in the day. This contrast in their relationships to food elucidates an overlooked aspect of gender inequality.
The film also delves into the fine line between loyalty and servitude. In India, a woman's time spent in the kitchen often reflects her status, self-esteem, and financial independence. Many homemakers like Ila dedicate themselves to cooking multiple meals daily, often for extended family members, only to eat after everyone else without compensation or gratitude.
The theme extends beyond Ila to the other female characters in the film: Deshpande Aunty and Ila's mother. Both of their husbands are unwell and bedridden, relying entirely on their wives for almost every aspect of their daily lives, including food.
In a poignant scene, Ila visits her father, who is battling lung cancer. Ila's mother vents her frustration about the costly treatment, and despite having no stable income herself, Ila offers to contribute to her father's medical care. Reluctantly, Ila's mother accepts her help but also expresses regret for not having a son to shoulder these responsibilities.
On one hand, these women are conditioned to be devoted housewives, on the other, their financial contributions are not appreciated simply because they are not male. It's as if their efforts are never enough. They constantly find themselves stuck between unsatisfied husbands and disappointed parents, with no financial agency to make their own decisions. These women, unfortunately, are reflective of a larger reality of India.
The loneliness experienced by Ila and Deshpande Aunty mirrors what I've seen firsthand among the women I grew up with, particularly those married into joint families.
Marriage for Indian women in general does imply some loss of identity, but marrying into a joint family takes this to a whole new level.
After marriage, a woman is expected to leave her own family behind, adopt her husband's surname, sometimes even change her first name, move into her husband's family home and, assume the responsibility of managing the household, including the arduous task of cooking for two to three generations of people 365 days a year. Almost overnight, she finds herself severed from her former life – her name, her friends, and her family. She has to navigate an unfamiliar house with unfamiliar people and she has no one to confide in. And this is just the beginning of her isolation.
Many of these women do not go on to own a personal bank account. They either end up with joint accounts with their husbands or receive a monthly allowance for household expenses, and sometimes, nothing at all. This leaves women not only without social support but also without any financial independence. Within a year or two of marriage, there's pressure from the family to have children, preferably sons.
In India, 22% of mothers suffer from postpartum depression, but the first time I heard of the term was during an anthropology course in college. The lack of awareness around postpartum depression reflects a cultural gap in addressing such issues. This is further underscored by the common practice in India where women go to their parental home, or "maika," to deliver their first child, with the husband often oblivious to the challenges women experience during delivery.
And this is what marriage means for a lot of women. If we didn’t have a word for this phenomena, it could just as easily be replaced by servitude.
Most women accept this to be their lives, thankfully Ila does not.
At the end Ila decides to make the courageous decision of leaving her husband and moving to Bhutan with her daughter. While waiting for her daughter to return from school before their departure, Sajaan seeks out Ila's house with the help of the dabbawalla.
Whether they meet or not, we don’t know. What we do know is that the friendship they developed inspired them to change their circumstance -to sacrifice the familiarity of their current lives for the possibility of happiness.
And what can we call that, if not love?