The Lunchbox

One of Mumbai's miracles is the lunchbox delivery phenomenon. Mumbai's Dabbawallas is a community of 5000 lunchbox deliverymen. It is a hereditary profession. Every morning the Dabbawallahs deliver hot meals from the kitchens of housewives to their husband's offices and then return the empty lunchboxes to the homes in the afternoon. For 120 years, they have provided Mumbaikars with a taste of home in the office. They navigate through the overcrowded local trains and chaotic streets that often have a namesake or more than one name. The Dabbawallahs, who are illiterate, use a complex coding system of colors and symbols to deliver dabbas in the labyrinth that is Mumbai. Harvard University analyzed their delivery system, and concluded that just one in 4 million lunchboxes are delivered to the wrong address. ‘Dabba' is the story of that one lunchbox. A wrongly delivered lunchbox connects a housewife - Ila Vaid, to Saajan Fernandes, a lonely man in the dusk of his life. Ila lives in Kandivali, the conservative middle-class Hindu enclave. And Saajan lives in Ranwar village, Bandra, an old Christian neighborhood threatened by the new high rises of Mumbai. Soon, Saajan will retire and bid goodbye to a Mumbai that crushed his dreams, took away his loved ones one by one, and turned his hair white. That is when Ila comes into his life. In the big city that crushes dreams and recycles them every day, they both find a dream to hold on to. They exchange notes in the lunchbox and create a fantasy life. As the lunchbox goes back and forth, this fantasy becomes so elaborate that it threatens to overwhelm their reality. The characters exist on the line between the Mumbai of reality and the Mumbai of fantasy. In the end, they come to a crossroads where they must choose between the two worlds. Here is a story of nostalgia and hope for the future and, above all, the small joys in life that need our attention.