Dabba
Ritesh Batra (2013)
In the opening scene of the young writer-director Ritesh Batra’s debut feature, a mother is preparing her young daughter for school. She tells the girl not to play outside because of the rain and to take care on the journey, warning of a bridge that’s come down in the bad weather. The child says, ‘But it’s stopped raining now’. ‘It can always start again’, comes the reply and, a screen minute later, it has. This anxious mother is a Mumbai housewife called Ila. By the end of The Lunchbox she’s preparing to leave Mumbai for Bhutan with the child Yashvi. Ila can no longer stand living with her uninterested and, she discovers, unfaithful husband Rajeev. Besides, the unusual epistolary relationship she’s had in the course of the film, with a late middle-aged office worker called Saajan Fernandes, hasn’t come to fruition in the way that Ila had hoped. As far as she knows, Saajan has now retired to a place called Nasik, leaving Ila even more isolated than when the story began. The audience can be slightly more hopeful of a happy ending for Saajan and Ila, even if it’s not one that we get to see and enjoy. Saajan has returned from Nasik to Mumbai, is going to try and find Ila, and thinks he knows how to succeed. It’s right that The Lunchbox ends in this way. Its last twenty minutes are a gripping contest between the clear-eyed realism that’s a hallmark of the film and the requirements, well understood by Ritesh Batra, of an emotionally satisfying romantic comedy-drama.
The Indian lunchbox (dabba) tradition in Mumbai has its origins, according to Wikipedia, in the late nineteenth century. In 1890, a man called Mahadeo Havaji Bachche:
‘… started a lunch delivery service with about a hundred men. In 1930, he informally attempted to unionize the dabbawallas … a charitable trust was registered in 1956 under the name of Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Trust.’
Ritesh Batra originally intended to make a documentary about the lunchbox system and his description of the dabbawallas’ daily routines, as they collect lunchboxes from private homes and dabba service outlets around the city and deliver them to individual workers in time for lunch, are absorbing to watch. You might think, given the rapid economic development of Mumbai in recent years, that the tradition is a dying one but as recently as 2007 the dabbawala industry was (also according to Wikipedia) still growing at between five and ten per cent each year. (You do wonder, though, given Mumbai’s status in the IT world, about the lack of computers in Saajan’s workplace in the film.) The dabba run operates on a very large scale: approaching 200,000 lunchboxes are moved each working day by between 4,500 and 5,000 dabbawalas. The system looks chaotic but the dabbawalas’ reliability in getting the right lunch to the right person is legendary – and confirmed by a recent Harvard Business School case study, which is mentioned in the film.
The plot of The Lunchbox depends on one of the rare exceptions to the rule. With culinary advice and encouragement from an elderly neighbour in the flat above, Ila cooks a new recipe for Rajeev, in the hope of finding her way back to his heart through his stomach. She’s excited when the dabbawala returns the lunchbox that day with everything in it eaten. But when she raises the subject with Rajeev on his return from work, he sounds underwhelmed by his lunch although he does commend the cauliflower. The cauliflower dish came from a seemingly mediocre dabba supplier in the city, which provides lunch for the widowed accountant Saajan. The dabbawala somehow mixed up the two lunchbox containers. Next day, Ila includes a note with the lunchbox, explaining to the unexpected recipient what must have happened. It continues to happen and the correspondence between Ila and Saajan develops.
Ritesh Batra thus uses a distinctive means to tell a familiar story – of two people, lonely in different ways, who, by accident, become important in each other’s lives. But the story is told with such intelligence and fine detail that The Lunchbox never feels formulaic as you’re watching, and Sajaan’s emergence from his thoroughgoing solitariness is one of the richest coming-out-of-a-shell screen stories of recent years. His unsociableness is both sad and amusing, particularly in the soon-to-retire Sajaan’s cussed determination to do all he can not to train the newcomer Shaikh to do the job that Sajaan has held for thirty-five years. All the acting is good but Irrfan Khan, who didn’t make much impression on me in either Slumdog Millionaire or Life of Pi, is masterly as Saajan. The changes in Khan’s animation as Saajan opens each new delivery from Ila – his facial expressions, his gestures, his breathing – are wonderfully subtle and expressive. You look forward to this acting treat as Saajan looks forward to the food and the note from Ila tucked under the flat bread. (The metal dabba is an intriguing construction.) There’s always something different to observe in Khan’s lunchbox routines. They chime with the work of the street painter that catches Saajan’s attention: the painter always uses the same cityscape background in his pictures but picks up changing details according to what he sees on the street each day. Irrfan Khan also shares Saajan’s thoughts and feelings with the viewer as you watch his interaction with Shaikh and a mutual liking develops between them.
As Ila, the beautiful Nimrat Kaur does well in a more difficult role: Ila’s circumstances limit her opportunities for expressing herself beyond what she puts in her notes to Saajan. Her husband isn’t interested in her. In response to one of Saajan’s more melancholy missives, she shares a childhood memory with her daughter (Yashvi Puneet Nagar); but Ila’s main interlocutor is Mrs Deshpande, the old lady upstairs, with whom she talks through an open window but who remains unseen. Nimrat Kaur skilfully conveys Ila’s changes of mood and emotional fortune through these conversations, the words of which are mostly conventional. Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s performance as Shaikh, enthusiastic about the prospect of his new job but not much good at it, is a delight. His blend of ingratiating charm and (once he realises what kind of man Saajan is) tentativeness is beautifully judged.
Shaikh tells Saajan that he’s an orphan but, later on, that ‘my mother always says: the wrong train will sometimes get you to the right station’. (This adage – the film’s motto – is perhaps spoken once too often by the end of The Lunchbox.) Saajan reminds Shaikh that he’s supposed to be an orphan and you think he’s been caught out. In fact, Shaikh’s duplicity is slightly more sophisticated: he is an orphan, he confirms to Saajan, but saying ‘my mother says makes things sound better’. I’d feared that The Lunchbox might be eccentrically charming but slight – and thereby invite a patronising response. The certificate warning offers the promise of nothing more than ‘infrequent references to suicide and one use of mild language’. But the film is tough-minded and often painfully acute. The exchanges between Ila and Auntie Deshpande (Bharati Achrekar) are largely amusing but, once you’re told about Auntie’s domestic situation, the conversation takes on a different meaning: she’s caring for her husband, who’s been in a coma for fifteen years. Ila’s own father is terminally ill and being looked after by her mother (Lillete Dubey). When he dies, the mother confesses to her daughter how fed up she’d become with the daily routine of breakfast, medicine, bathing her husband. She also says that, even so, she often dreaded the prospect of his death and wondered what it would be like in the event. Now that it’s happened, all that she feels is hungry.
Although Ritesh Batra predictably draws parallels between the desire for delicious food and other kinds of appetite, the illustrations of this are more troubling than expected. Rajeev (Nakul Vaid) shows interest in the contents of his lunchbox only as a means of thwarting Ila’s attempts to get him to have sex with her: he chooses his moment carefully to grumble that the cauliflower in the dabba gives him wind. Once Ila smells something else – a woman’s perfume – on Rajeev’s shirts as she prepares to wash them, she knows he’s lost to her (it makes a kind of sense that Rajeev doesn’t even appear on screen again after this point). Shaikh makes the evening meal for himself and his bride-to-be (Shruti Bapna) and chops up ingredients on the commuter train home whenever he can get a seat: at one point, Saajan’s boss (Denzil Smith) calls in him and Shaikh not only to complain about the inaccuracies in Shaikh’s work but also to ask why the files smell of vegetables. The most poignant olfactory moment occurs on the day that Saajan is preparing to meet Ila in person – and is the cause of his decision not to go through with doing so (although he watches her in the café where they’d arranged to meet). He tries to look his smartest and is worried that he’s missed a bit of beard growth. As he tells Ila in his letter the next day, when he went back to finish shaving, the bathroom smelt the way it used to when Sajaan’s grandfather had been using it. Sajaan is horrified by smelling like an old man. He feels he can’t inflict himself on the lovely, much younger Ila.
Some of the plotting of The Lunchbox doesn’t bear close inspection – or, at least, Ritesh Batra doesn’t make things sufficiently clear. If the grotty café’s lunchbox continues to go to Rajeev, why does he take so long to complain to Ila about the effects of the cauliflower? (Or is he having lunch with his girlfriend?) Sajaan takes the blame for Shaikh’s serious errors with the accounts and, until he smells his age in the bathroom, has changed his mind about retiring: although Shaikh’s prospective father-in-law has bought him a motorcycle as a reward for his promotion, the young man actually seems much happier with the idea of working as Saajan’s assistant rather than his successor. Are we meant to think that, by the time Sajaan actually does retire, he’s got round to training Shaikh effectively or is Shaikh’s occupancy of Sajaan’s desk only temporary? These are relatively minor faults of storytelling and don’t significantly detract from the quality of The Lunchbox. The score by Max Richter is pleasant but unremarkable. The chant of the dabbawalas, though, is insistent and rousing. It accompanies the final shots of the film – Saajan, travelling with the men, is taking the route back to Ila’s apartment block – and it continues throughout the closing credits.
14 April 2014
