A Lunchbox Full Of Longing

There is this moment in Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox where Irrfan Khan’s Saajan Fernandez says a name aloud for the first time. And it reminds one of Jess C. Scott’s famous quote, “When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You know that your name is safe in their mouth.” He smiles, savouring the name in his silence for a few long seconds, breathing both nervousness and anticipation and the thrill of opening an unexpected  present. “Ila, ” he says finally.
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But this moment will come after a long time. Before that we will hear the beating heart of Mumbai..as we travel with Saajan in throbbing local trains. And will watch Mumbai’s people, masses of them like restless, peckish pigeons, searching for sustenance. Carrying lunchboxes strapped to carts and bicycles for hungry office workers. Spilling out of train compartments. Frozen behind office desks. Shining shoes. Painting street art. People trapped in walls of silence even in the noise of a rumbling city. Trying to survive. Forgetting to live. Because as Saajan once says profoundly, “You forget things when you have noone to tell them to.”
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Saajan Fernandez. Named perhaps by his parents at a time when romance was an easy to hum film song. His name now a stroke of irony because romance to him and to us maybe,  is lost like the memories of another time. A time when we watched television comedies like Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi and laughed at small things. A time that reminds us of loved faces now gone forever from our lives.The faces we would give anything to see again. And youth. Or the sense of it  that is gone too. Along with hope that was  once young just like us. A time when we did not feel like dated lottery tickets. When we made eye contact with life and did not always look away like Saajan does even when he is unwillingly making conversation with a pesky colleague. Or travelling in a train, looking at nothing but life passing him by.

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And the film answers also why nostalgia means so much to us..to those of us who hoard old film cassettes, watch videos of old serials all through the night and look back more often than we look ahead?  It is because these moments  bring back a time when we were invested in life and felt everything. And now we are just spectators like Saajan when he stands in his rundown balcony every night and watches a bright window and in it the tableau of a happy family eating dinner together. And hears the laughter he will never be a part of. That tear that threatens to escape the corner of his eye when he watches this scene? That is what The Lunchbox is about. Unshed tears. Unspoken angst. Unrelieved grief. And the sense of loss when Saajan enters his bathroom one day and is jostled by the smell of his grandfather and realises, he is not smelling the past but who he has become. An old man who can only be a part of a young woman’s dreams of happiness for a short while. But never her future.
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But ofcourse, he does not really know this young woman that well, does he? She is..yes.. Ila. She sits on her haunches in a small bathroom everyday, smelling traces of her husband’s infidelity on his shirts. A husband who cannot even look at her when she talks to him. Who does not finish sentences and is always in a hurry to leave in search of something else outside his home, ignoring the companionship that Saajan would give anything to have. Like Saajan says astutely, “Your husband sounds like a busy man. Everyone is in a hurry these days and everyone wants what the other has.” So the lunchbox Ila’s husband eats even without tasting it lands one day serendipitously on Saajan’s desk and he luxuriates in it as if the world that has forgotten him and he has turned his back on has embraced him again in a waft of lovingly cooked masala bhindi.

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And no, he doesn’t know just how lonely Ila is. So lonely infact that she only has an invisible neighbour to talk to.  So yes, it is just so right that two people who would have nothing to say to each other if they met accidentally on a train, should find it completely natural to open their hearts in letters tucked every day in the lunchbox. Hers placed under the neatly folded rotis. His folded in an  empty container. The flow of their conversations as heart-warming as AR Gurney’s Love Letters though like the protagonists of the play, Ila and Saajan have not shared a full-bodied past or star crossed passion.
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It is so proper that a man who cannot make small talk and a woman who can only make small talk with the chatty aunty (Bharati Achrekar) upstairs, will share things with each other, they have noone to share them with. She will talk about her dead brother. He about his dead wife. She about her husband and the morbid thoughts that shook her when she heard of a woman committing suicide with her daughter. He about things that he should be telling himself. That things are never as bad as they seem. She about the Orient fan that her neighbour’s sick husband spends his last years looking at as if there is nothing else to life. “Maybe there really is nothing else, ” she writes and adds ominously, “then why live?”

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And he worrying for her even though he has never met her. Hoping that she will not think suicidal thoughts or follow them from the top of her building. She telling him not to smoke. Cooking his favourite aubergines. And the changes. Tiny but hugely symbolic. The trickle of warmth spreading in their frozen hearts. As he looks forward impatiently each day to the dabba. And creates a little ritual of smelling the contents first and then opening the containers, spreading each one  before him and then looking for that little note that always begins with a brusque ‘Hello’ but then tumbles into his heart, making him smile and frown and remember and hope for things he has forgotten the existence of. And she always checking if he has eaten every morsel of the food she has sent and then brewing a cup of thick milky tea and then sitting down at her dining table to read his little note.
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The songs from Saajan she wants to hear all over again on her neighbour’s cassette player because his name is Saajan. He noticing his name in the same song when he hears it in the local train. His sudden warmth towards the kids in his street. And towards a young colleague  about to replace him in his office. Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s Shaikh tries clumsily but resolutely to breach the reserve that Saajan has built around himself. And after many attempts, manages to reach the man who speaks little but is beginning to feel a lot because there is now a woman in his life who cooks for him though she has never met him, a woman who writes daily to him. Who he is beginning to imagine his life with. In Bhutan of all places because that country has a gross domestic happiness index! Watch him when a note says, “Ab humain mil lena chahiye.” He can’t breathe. He can’t think. He can’t believe what is about to happen. His life suddenly has potential. Hope. Excitement. It has not ended. He is alive! In the age of virtual chatting and constantly buzzing mobiles, this is a hugely moving moment because it is so real, so tactile. Just like the longing for a turning point and a life-changing conversation.
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Irrfan Khan. What can one say to describe his Saajan Fernandez? Even the nerves on his forehead speak. There is the jaded austerity in every line of his face that we know kills so many of us even before we are dead. His measured gestures, restraint, unkind silences when Shaikh is trying to warm up to him, trying to catch his eye. His sudden smiles when his eyes come alive and he begins to notice the world around him and begins to share his food, his space, his thoughts with Shaikh who he could not stand earlier. This man is an acting school. A superlative actor who acts without seeming to and seeps into a Paan Singh Tomar, a Makhdoom Mohiuddin, a Saajan Fernandez like he was born to live many lives in one. He is a quietly hard working legend and it is a privilege to see his work in our usually one note cinema.
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Nawazuddin Siddiqui with his curious, perceptive, street smart eyes, his longing for a mentor, his poodle like eagerness to please sets off Irrfan’s internalised performance superbly. His Shaikh teaches Saajan that when you claw back from the square one of nothingness, when there is no family and no one to fall back upon, that is when you invent hope. You fake it even till it becomes real. And you love. Bravely and without reserve.
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Nimrat Kaur who you will remember from a Kumar Sanu video (Tera Mera Pyar) is like no Hindi film heroine you have seen recently. She is not a creature of popular male fantasies. She is a real woman living in dark, brooding, colourless domesticity looking for a connection, for validation. And whether she is cooking a meal or reading a letter, she is never playing to the camera (cinematography by Michael Simmonds) that has no say in the proceedings except to record her lost, sad eyes, her helplessness in a marriage that is nothing but a series of chores. And it is a joy to watch her famished spirit lighting up when the food she cooks becomes an emissary, a message sent and received, a chain of hope.
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This film does many things differently. It does not play to the 100 crore gallery. It does not overstate the obvious. It just is. Like life. This is a literary film written and filmed beautifully but not in a cosmetic sense. It is beautiful because it unlocks you, makes you feel, hope and laugh and cry without ever being obvious. It captures the resonance and deep emotive appeal of film songs and television ( notice how Sanjeev Kapoor’s cooking shows provide the sound track of Ila’s life) without relying on their cliches. It tells a story the way it should be told. Without needless deviations. Reminding us that cinema must also feed more than just the hunger for escape.
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The ending? I would have liked to see Shaikh in his flower decked scooter carrying Ila to the man she is searching  for or the man  to arrive at her doorstep with the title track of Saajan playing in the background. But then the film, we said before, is like life. Open ended. Where anything is possible.Even falling in love with someone you have never met. Go watch it.

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Reema Moudgil has been writing for magazines and newspapers on art, cinema, issues, architecture and more since 1994, is an RJ, hosts a daily Ghazal show, runs unboxed writers, is the editor of Chicken Soup for The Indian Woman’s soul, the author of Perfect Eight (http://www.flipkart.com/perfect-eight-9380032870/p/itmdf87fpkhszfkb?pid=9789380032870&_l=A0vO9n9FWsBsMJKAKw47rw–&_r=dyRavyz2qKxOF7Yuc ) and an artist.

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