The Lunchbox - a review

My father was a chartered accountant.  He (like my mother) had left school at 14 in wartime Liverpool to work as an office clerk after his own father died of cancer.  From there he took his accountancy exams and eventually – through hard work and talent - became Chief Accountant at an insurance company in the City of London.  In another era and more auspicious family circumstances, he almost certainly would have gone to university and perhaps studied the history and classics he was so interested in.  Instead he was self-educated, with our house filled with the hundreds of books he bought throughout his life – along with a half-started, never completed, Open University course in classics.

But towards middle age, the responsibility of being the breadwinner and commuting to London and back from the suburbs every day took its toll and he had a weariness about him.  He suffered a heart attack in his early 50s but recovered reasonably well.  Only a few years later, however, six months after taking early retirement to have more time developing his interests, he died suddenly in his sleep of another heart attack at the age of 58.

Saajan Fernandes (played by Irrfan Khan) in the film ‘The Lunchbox’ reminded me of my father.  He is an accountant approaching retirement in the claims department of a Mumbai office, surrounded by piles of papers and files.  His wife has died and each day he takes the crowded train to and from the office, lunchtimes spent eating alone and evenings spent alone on his balcony, away from the chatter of family life.  He has that air of world weariness, a lifetime of dutiful employment – steady, reliable but resigned to a humdrum and lonely existence.

Each day his lunch is delivered in a tiffin box by one of Mumbai’s feated dabbawalas – whose efficiency and accuracy in the meal delivery service has been studied by Harvard business school.  One day, however, a one-in-a-million mistake is made and instead of his usual delivery, he is given a superior, but wrong lunch intended for the husband of Ila (played by Nimrat Kaur).  Ila’s days are taken up looking after her young daughter, cooking and household chores and occasionally visiting her mother, who is caring for her father dying of lung cancer.  She is lonely too, in a loveless marriage with an indifferent husband she suspects is having an affair.  ‘Auntie’ is a companion of sorts – an older woman who lives in the flat upstairs, who we meet in the film only as the disembodied voice offering advice and assistance to Ila in conversations through the open window.

Ila realises that her lunch she had prepared had been wrongly delivered when the tiffin box is returned empty for once.  She decides to include a note in the next lunch, believing it will be delivered again to the same wrong person.  When it is returned with a return note in the tiffin box, a correspondence starts between these two lonely individuals.  Slowly, each reveals more about their life to the other and a friendship of sorts develops.

I loved and was captivated by this film.  Directed by Ritesh Batra, it is a departure from the Bollywood classic combination of romance, music and dance with its realism and low key detailing of ordinary lives.  There are many resonances and themes within the story itself.  Food becomes a medium for connection – and communication when Ila gets her own back by making the meal too spicy as ‘punishment’ for Saajan’s previous complaint of a meal being too salty.    Each character has their own loss: Ila’s brother had died in an accident and her terminally ill father eventually dies.  Saajan has lost his wife and his over-eager trainee Shaikh (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) is an orphan, having lost both his parents.

The women in the film are seen as defined and limited by their caring and domestic roles: Ila as a young mother and housewife and Ila’s mother in caring for her terminally ill father – her mother confessing that she found him ‘disgusting’ in the last few years of his life.  Even ‘Auntie’ upstairs has been caring for her husband who has been in a coma for many years.

But we see the old bureaucratic India – in Saajan’s paper-filled and computer-less office – being replaced by a faster, brasher city, with Shaikh - Saajan is supposed to train as his replacement - having blagged his way into the job he is not really qualified to do.  The old-fashioned communication by letter allows space and suspense in a way today’s instant email and texts do not.  Saajan’s young replacement defies the social norms and lives with his girlfriend as her father had not approved of their marrying (a ‘love’ match rather than the traditional arranged marriage).  Even Saajan finds himself awkwardly referring to Ila as his ‘girlfriend’ for want of a better word.

When my father started work in the City of London in the early ‘60s it was still a world of bowler hats and starched collars.  It was very much a gentleman’s club with business still conducted on a personal level, based on agreements and trust. My father could still be mostly assured of catching the same train from London Bridge each day to get him home in time for tea at 6pm – prepared by a mostly stay-at-home wife.  The ‘Big Bang’ of the 80s brought in 24 hour world markets, faster impersonalised dealing in a globalised world with deals conducted anonymously via computer screens - the old-school city gentlemen left marginalised and bewildered as they were pushed aside by youthful testosterone, female ambition and bravado.

‘The Lunchbox’ has this same sense of the quiet decay of the old order – but one that also beckons at possibilities and lives beyond the quiet loneliness of both Saajan and Ila – as their tiffin box correspondence allows them to hope for more.

A beautiful and deeply touching film.