The Lunchbox by Ritesh Batra, which came out on this day ten years ago, is a sensory joy. One of the best cuisine videos to come out of the nation, it tempts you to eat the packed karelas and inhale the aroma of the bhindi sprinkled with coconut flakes. But sight, or the lack of it, is one sensation that subtly asserts itself.
Of course, the neat aesthetic of Irrfan Khan’s Saajan Fernandes, a non-vegetarian, enjoying every mouthful of the vegetarian Cuisine prepared by a stranger, and Nimrat Kaur’s Ila, kneading the dough and packing home-cooked Maharashtrian food into the lunchbox, make for a perfect arc of fantastic Cuisine.
But what cannot be seen is where The Lunchbox’s heart beats. It symbolises Ila’s lightness when she notices the lack of weight in the lunchbox she sends for her husband. It is just as affirming for her husband to eat all her food as it is for him to consent to a sexual approach.
Even Deshpande’s Aunty, who proposes recipes to Ila from the apartment above, is never depicted in the movie. She establishes early away that Ila doesn’t require a visual to confide in someone because she is Ila’s go-to person rather than her daughter or husband. Here, proximity is more visceral than emotional.
Except for Ila’s husband, no other character in The Lunchbox is ever seen using a phone. Unless we examine it very closely, we can’t tell whether the story is set in a time before cell phones or not.
Phones must be abandoned or at least dismissed in an epistolary relationship. But Ritesh Batra gives the impression from away that Ila and Saajan aren’t the kind of people who would talk on the phone even if they had the option. They are not fossils; instead, they are essentially romantic idealists.
Even in Ritesh’s follow-up movie, Our Souls At Night from Netflix India, Robert Redford only gives Jane Fonda a phone near the movie’s end when there is no other way for them to continue their romance.
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