Lunch Express!
Dabbawalah.jpg (3667×2010)


At certain times of day, at daybreak, in the middle of the afternoon and again late in the night, factory shift-workers carrying their tiffin containers on their way to the Kohinoor Mills just beyond the corner of our road where it intersected with Ambedkar Road, would fill the sidewalks spilling onto the road until it looked like a human river.
And every time the work shift changed at the cotton mills, a loud siren would sound and other workers whose shifts had just ended would stream down our road in the opposite direction back towards the station. And then all would be quiet again until another train arrived and cars and taxis loaded with luggage would noisily turn the corner next to our house, speeding down Balchandra Road in the direction of Tilak Bridge.
Sometime, in between the sirens and millworker deluges, every weekday rain or shine alike, In the middle of the morning, the tiffin-carrier men - the dabbah-wallas - would arrive and park their long see-saw-like carts along the sides of our street. As a child playing on our balcony, I would watch with interest as the dabba-wallas would mop their sweaty brows with the strips of cloth they hung over their shoulders and run off to collect freshly-packed lunch-boxes from the homes of their customers that they would then hurry back to pack in bunches on their carts, looping long ropes through the handles of the tiffin carriers.
When satisfied that the arrangements were secure, they would unceremoniously run to the front of their ten- to twelve-foot long carts, bend to pick up the long handles and start off, running, nudging their carts into the stream of traffic, and disappearing into the distance. Even as a child, I noticed the constant sense of movement, they always moved quickly. No one seemed to dawdle for some reason.
I used to wonder where they went until someone explained to me that they carried and delivered these fresh homemade  lunches to their customers in their offices. A few times, when we were out downtown during lunchtime in the Fort area near Churchgate where there were a lot of office buildings, I would see dozens of the long tiffin carrier carts parked at the edge and as many of the dabba-wallas hurrying about from building to building delivering the lunch-boxes. And no sooner had they completed their deliveries than they would repeat their rounds, this time, to collect the emptied boxes to take back with them.
After they had re-roped the containers to their carts, some of them would start off right away on their return trip, disappearing into the tangle of traffic. Others would find a quiet space before they set out, to take a small nap, with the strip of cloth serving as an improvised sleep mask this time. From our balcony, I would watch the dabbah-wallas return, park their carts and swiftly dispense with the chore of returning the containers to the homes that they came from. Then they would haul their empty, considerably lighter, carts back into the traffic and disappear until the next morning,
The dabba-wallas were often semi-literate young men who did not seem to have received any particular training but learned the ins and outs of their job as they went on. Today, decades later, in our technologically enhanced world, I discovered online that the more than 130 years-old practice has modernized in keeping with the changing times. Wikipedia informed me that Mumbai’s dabba-wallas have been the focus of much attention from newspapers and news-channels and stations around the world and even the subject of research at Harvard University and elsewhere.
It seems that, in addition to going high-tech with the use of online websites, SMS-texting and emails, the unionised dabba-wallas today employ a more elaborate transportation system involving bicycles and the Indian Railways in addition to the longstanding ubiquitous long crates and carts. At the same time, it remains one of the most intricate systems in the world with about 5000 dabba-wallas delivering between 175,000 and 200,000 fresh lunches daily.
In my mind’s eye, I watch these men arrive with tiffin-boxes containing hot lunches at my school for some of my classmates. They would wait sometimes impatiently for the children to finish, collect the containers and be off pushing their long carts. I realize now with the distance lent by the passage of time that all these years, it had not been evident to me at all that this had been such an unusual and special thing that it is now considered to be.
* * * * *


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Afternoon Visitors

Image
  When I was growing up in Mumbai in the late ‘50s and the ‘60’s, we often had visitors. Or to be precise, my grandparents did. After the many decades they had spent in the south and north of India and my grandfather’s long and steady career in the government’s Ministry of Finance, they had numerous friends and acquaintances in addition to our large and expanding extended family network. In their role as elders, they received visitors who were contemporaries, peers, old friends, their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, siblings, cousins, nieces, nephews, other relatives close and distant, removed by varying degrees, kin by marriage or blood or both.  Often they would call out to us to join them - my mother and the three of us - to introduce us and explain the intricate connections to us. These visits knit us all into a kind of large colorful social fabric, providing ongoing cognitive stimulus to our young imaginations working out these interwoven webs of relationsh...
Read more
Image
Head-Bath Days Throughout my childhood, usually, once or twice a week, came the head-baths, the crowning rituals of our grooming routines. Head-baths were not to be taken lightly, they were special events not to be interfered with. Everything adjusted and fitted around head-baths, not the other way around as it is with most of us today. Large pots of steaming hot water augmented the efforts of our struggling hot­-water geyser and we mixed the hot and cold water stored in buckets into the one we were using to bathe from.   For reasons of convenience, our head-bath days were almost always on Saturdays which marked the respite from a full week of going to school and packed weekday routines. For hours before, hair would be oiled and combed and the scalp massaged furiously. Two or more cycles of washing, shampooing and rinsing would be followed by toweling dry. My sisters and I, taken one by one into the bathroom by our mother with her sari hitched up to her knees...
Read more
Image
A Smile for Chacha Nehru The year 1960 began with the Indian Science Congress session taking place in Bombay. I had turned five and started in elementary school soon after my sister was born, the previous year. Juggling the simultaneous and sometimes-conflicting demands of two young children, my family had gradually regained its equilibrium and now our lives were slowly returning to a more predictable pattern. A couple of times a month, my parents would plan a special outing towards the late afternoon or evening in which I was often included. My mother and I sometimes would catch a train downtown to Churchgate Station and walk or ride a cab to wherever we were headed – a movie theatre, a departmental store, a restaurant, someone’s home. A little later, my father would join us there and we would spend the evening doing whatever we had planned. As the sun began setting beyond the waters of the Arabian Sea, casting magnificent golden-orange and purple streaks across the ...
Read more