The Lunchbox: A Review

Have you been in love or have you loved? Yes, they are different. Probably your answer is YES. I have fallen in love once, twice, thrice......the nth time. I am awaiting for the n+1th time. Therefore, when the tag line of The Lunchbox caught my attention, ‘Can you love someone who you have never met, added with it the names of Irrfan Khan and Nawazuddin Siddiqui, I had made up my mind to watch the movie. After all, the word love has the power to ignite even the North Pole. I was a little apprehensive about the tag line though, thinking if this is going to be another torture like The Japanese Wife. However, watching movies is the only way out of my otherwise mundane weekends. So, I went.

The Lunchbox is as much about the lunchbox, as it is about the lunch-maker and the man who eats it. It is a celebration of the mediocre mass of this country. It is about nostalgia, about the ones who are not a part of the urbane, iPad-hooked, upwardly-mobile crowd. It is about loneliness, the ones you can identify and therefore encompassing in nature irrespective of which strata of society you belong to.

It takes ample guts to produce a movie that does not have any of these elements—a glamorous, curvaceous (size zero is not the in thing anymore) heroine, a good-looking hero made of six-pack (the least), foreign locales, babes and bods. The producer trio need to be lauded for such a valiant investment. They believed in the script that blows you off with its simplicity. For a while you start thinking how on earth can you make a movie on a lunchbox! But, I was amazed to see a strong crowd of 400 odd people in urban Bangalore throng the theatre to watch a movie that has a lunchbox, a never to be seen auntie, a not-glamorous neglected wife, a widower dabba-eater, few hand-written chitthis, and the Mumbai special dabbas, and that is it!. I fail to believe that such strong a crowd has the same absence of social life like mine! It must be the movie!

Director-Writer Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox moves beyond the territory of being just a container of delectable platter of Paneer Pasinda or Tinde ki Subzi. Within 20 minutes of the screen time the innocuous lunchbox becomes a container of collective expectations, aspirations, reminiscences, hopes....and all those emotions that we have not named yet, may never be able to! Sajaan Fernandez (Irrfan Khan) is a 60-year old widower, with parted hair that has been oiled liberally, an unkempt salt and pepper moustache. He wears a Terri cotton shirt that you can buy in not more than Rs.300 these days, the ones with which akkha India’s office babus spend their entire lives in the daftars. There is no heroism in Sajaan’s character. He is the one you see every day in crowded buses and trains and you hardly ever notice. He is the one like me who treats oneself to an auto ride if something ‘happy’ happens to life (I sometimes buy sweets also). He is as mean as those typical office babus who, when it is time for them to retire, do not want to ‘train’ (what I really mean here is Knowledge Transfer or KT as we call it) his replacement. He is so mean that once when a blind man had asked for alms from him he has pushed that man and the fellow had died under the wheels of a lorry! If you thought that was cruelty, you will feel riled when you hear Sajaan utter the incident with unmatched ease to his colleague Nawazuddin. ‘You better be careful’, says Sajaan to Nawazuddin. We shudder and so does Nawazuddin but isn’t that a reality? Are we not, or are we not surrounded by, such people?

Ila (Nimrat Kaur), the other central character is a woman in her late thirties with unkempt eye brows. She has a daughter of about 10-years old. Ila makes mouth-watering food for her husband with the expectation that the taste of the food will cast a magic spell in the indifferent husband and Ila will get some attention from her husband. Theirs is a household where the husband comes pretty late at night, the three in the family gather at the dinner table, watch the news on the television, quietly finish their dinner, hit the bed....and doze off!

Ila smells her husband’s shirts when she puts them to wash and one day finds the scent of a woman on a shirt. Ila’s husband is having an affair. You expect a family mellow drama of the husband and wife shouting and abusing at each other but that does not happen.... the way it does not happen in millions of households where the man and the woman live together year after year without a hint of passion, love, and affection manifested in their relationship.

Ila’s only friend-philosopher-guide is a certain Deshpande auntie who lives in the flat above Ila’s. That auntie is never to be seen in the movie. But from Ila we get to know that for the past 15 years Deshpande auntie’s husband has been living a vegetable life in bed looking at the Orient fan! Looks like one day there was a power cut for a few seconds and Deshpande uncle almost had his breath caught when the power came back and so did Deshpande uncle’s life! Therefore, Deshpande aunty never switches off the fan and cleans it while the fan is turned on! Ila listens to Deshpande auntie’s radio, cassettes and when Rajeev, Ila’s husband comes back, the celebration of the two lonely homemakers end. One day Ila’s tiffin box with sumptuous food meant for her husband erroneously lands at Sajaan’s office table and neither Ila nor Sajaan try to correct the mistake. What ensues is a tale of letter exchanges between a neglected wife and a widower man.

You as an audience start to expect the obvious...may be the letters will contain each other’s unfulfilled wishes, cardinal desires, they will propose to each other, they will meet and Ila will divorce her husband and live a new life!

Nothing of that sort happens.

Sajaan and Ila communicate their loneliness, rekindle their memories through a few scribbles written in the torn off pages from exercise books that you and I used in our school days. Ila talks about her childhood and Sajaan his long-lost youth, time spent with his wife, the life of early nineties when DD1 was the only window to entertainment and the nation swooned to Kuman Sanu’s ‘Mera dil bhi kitna pagal hain’ from 'Sajaan'.

Just when you start to think the relevance of Nawazzuddin Sidiqqui in the film, the powerful common man emerges victorious with his commonness and mediocrity. How can you portray mediocrity with such élan is something the director has shown in this cinematic extravaganza. Nawazzuddin is a chipkoo....I cannot think of any word that explains his character as the word ‘chipkoo’ does. He has mediocre ability and no ego that makes him eligible for nothing more than the position of a clerk in the claims department of a 10-5 office. He tries to tag along Sajaan irrespective of whether the latter shoves him off or not, cuts vegetables in the train using the office file as the chop board to save time, refers to ‘Meri ammi kahan karti hain’, whereas he actually is an orphan. He has done everything on his own, including choosing a name for himself as Aslam Sheikh! The aroma of Sajaan’s lunchbox makes him infringe on Sajaan’s solitary lunch hour and the lunch. Aslam has no shame to reveal that as a dowry her fiancé’s dad will give a scooter to Aslam in his marriage.

All these are common, so common that they precariously snoop in very close to those closed compartments of your being. In about an hour into the movie you identify each and every element of the film as yours….either seen or taste.

The movie's trailers sold this movie as a love story. But to me it struck as a tale of loneliness..the various kinds that you can name or may not name. The loneliness of Ila connects with Sajaan’s and the loneliness of Aslam connects with Sajaan’s. Not sure why the marketing army of the film never mentioned loneliness as the underlying theme of this movie may be because love sells more than loneliness.

The casting of the movie is impeccable. Irrfan Khan knows how not to act and a lot of time that helps. Sajaan Fernandez makes you a party to his lunch hour, the delectable platter that he smells way before the actual lunch hour and when the lunchbox arrives there is this faint, almost unnoticeable smile that caresses his cigarette-burned lips. You smile too. You feel relieved that there is a letter. You almost want to shoulder-surf and read the lines. The day the letter does not come, you are probably more dejected than Sajaan. It is almost magical how the audience, Saajan, his lunchbox, the aroma of the food cast an enchanting spell to bind all together. It is like the inexplicable smell of old, tattered books, copies, letters…the smell of memories— fond or not so fond ones.

Nimrat Kaur—is she a first timer? I suspect she has a theatre lineage, if not; my question is, what was she doing all these while! Her loneliness, helplessness with that loneliness, desperation to express that loneliness to an unknown office clerk using the lunchbox as the medium, and then a final bid to escape that loneliness by deciding to go to Bhutan (she learns that Bhutan does not have GDP but a Gross Domestic Happiness index) to find solace and happiness, mirror a thousand rejected, dejected, and nowhere to go homemakers’ state of mind. It is hard to ignore her because she is so real!

Lillette Dubey’s cameo appearance as Ila’s mother and the mother-daughter conversation post Ila’s dad’s death drives home a striking reality. Lillette has been nursing Ila’s lung-cancer-ridden dad for years. The impoverished mother has sold off almost everything she could to run the medical expenses. When Ila’s dad dies, Lillette says, ‘Mujhe bahut bhookh lagi hain, main subah se kuchh nahi khayi. Itne salon se main sochti rahein gayi ki inke jaane ke baad mera kya hoga, par aaj jab yeh chalein gayein to mujhe baas bhukh lag rahi hain.’ Something in your cardiac corner writhes in pain. You touch your heart, the pain increases. Reality is that brazen...you choose to accept it or not. When death becomes a wait, love, patience, compassion and every softer emotion takes a backseat and the wait becomes painfully omnipresent. Lillette reveals the shocking truth to Ila: ‘Itne salon se inka dawa, khana, inko saaf karna…..yeh sab kartein kartein mann mein itna ghin paida ho gaya hain na!’

Ahh…you groan!

Nawazuddin, the garrulous clerk is a striking contrast to Irrfan’s reticent, self-obsessed, character. Nawazuddin’s acting acumen has reached yet another zenith in The Lunchbox. The guy has stopped surprising us for we expect nothing but excellence from him now. There are films that make you happy and forget the mundane. There are films that make you think and inspire you to deny the mundane. The Lunchbox allows you to rejoice the mundane.

A must watch, if I may humbly recommend!