Because the way to the heart is often through the stomach, neglected housewife Ila (Nimrat Kaur) decides to consult an auntie who lives above her Mumbai flat for lunch recipes that can satisfy her inattentive husband.
Irrfan Khan in The Lunchbox.
“With those spices, your husband will build you a Taj Mahal,” coos the never-seen auntie from her floor.
“Yes,” says Ila. “But auntie, Taj Mahal is a tomb.”
Such melancholic wit — and a tone of restrained melodrama — is what makes Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox a small gem. Defying the stereotype that Hindi-speaking films are all diamond-studded song and dance through cloud-scraping peak productions, The Lunchbox has a becalmed appeal and cooler temperature than your average Indian love story. The plot may seem slightly fantastical set in the heaving Third World megalopolis — two people who never meet develop a bond through messages exchanged in a lunchbox — but the ground-level reality of Mumbai, the intelligent script, and the subdued glamour of Irrfan Khan (last seen in Life Of Pi and Slumdog Millionaire) give the film a wistful air as it attempts to explore an unlikely subject of modern Indian cinema: urban loneliness.
It all starts with the complex lunchbox delivery system of Mumbai (“The Harvard people came to study us,” boasts a man in a turban). Housewives and restaurants dispatch lunchboxes into a network of deliverers who use bicycles, trucks, carts and trains to land the packages at the office tables of their respective husbands and clients at the other end of the city, mostly without fail. Until one of them does. Khan plays Saajan Fernandez, a clerk in a claims department who’s retiring in a month from the company he’s been working at for 35 years. One noontime, Fernandez receives a lunchbox that’s not meant for him. Ila, the young housewife, has cooked the meal for her husband, but through a rare mix-up, her spiced curry and fried okra end up with Fernandez.
The lunchbox comes back to Ila that afternoon empty — “It’s as if he’d licked it clean,” she exclaims with joy. But Ila soon realises that her carefully cooked, Taj Mahal-worthy food didn’t go to her husband, and the next day she puts a note into the box. And so begins a correspondence between the spurned Ila and the gloomy Fernandez, a widower with a sad past and sadder future as the spectre of lonely retirement looms. Their letters, exchanged though the lunchbox as it goes back and forth through the city, are more like diary entries in which they both lament about their anxiety and uncertainty of life; Ila writes about her unhappy marriage, and Fernandez slowly reveals his past and the reason he’s living alone. Having a faceless reader of your personal longings smacks of old-fashioned charm in the age of Facebook’s public confessions, and The Lunchbox milks this vintage romance with serenity and skill.
Given that this is Mumbai; a city of millions, constant hubbub, overcrowded humanity and eternal traffic, the thought of loneliness — of feeling like you’re living on an island — is especially scary and sorrowful. Fernandez, in particular, hardly speaks and seems to have no social life, and when his young replacement, Shaikh (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), shows up all bubbly and motor-mouthed, the older man initially closes himself in like a guarded flower. The Lunchbox is a story of finding connection, of believing in the possibilities, if not of love, then of friendship, and while that sounds banal as a movie subject, the film finds genuine gravity in the portrait of its character and the city they live in.
The Lunchbox is a co-production between India and France and is one of the recent Indian movies that has managed to cross over into the international “arthouse” arena — in the past few years there has been the thrilling, decade-spanning Gangs Of Wasseypur (the so-called Indian The Godfather), and the little-seen yet deliciously eccentric Miss Lovely, about Mumbai’s horror-porn industry in the 1980s. Bangkok has seen regular releases of Bollywood flicks of late — the star-studded, high-octane Dhoom 3 is still showing — but with The Lunchbox viewers are likely to realise the universe of Hindi-speaking film, like India itself, is larger and more nuanced that we often assume it is.
