The rain dribbled outside as i sat in, holed up.. watching The Lunchbox for the nth time. I wonder what brings me to watch this movie over and over again... I've seen it so many times that I have now sort of come to by heart it's dialogues. It's distinct aloneness, the solitary shots of Irrfan Khan aka Saajan Fernandes smoking imaginary cigarettes in his balcony are one of my main points of attraction for this movie. These moments, each of them repositories of vast stretches of times that have gone by, it seems as if Saajan is trying to undo decades of smoking.. the frames, each of them like decades stretched out before our eyes, how he had spent an age smoking like that, all by himself and then someone had quietly wished upon him to not smoke and he had tried to not smoke suddenly that evening, on compulsory obedience of that small request,, as if he had just been waiting for the request.. the movie often plays in my mind, in the background the dialogues running like a conversation I had with someone very close to ages ago, and was trying to remember it .. I play it on the laptop and continue doing small odd chores of the house often. While they discuss seemingly inconsequential things such as the whirring of the Orient Fan and the recipe by Ila's grandmother, I wash dishes and fill up water bottles and line them up in the fridge. Maybe watching this movie is my manner of filling my otherwise quiet life with conversations and background score, or maybe it's just my longing for a love so solitary and weepy like this. I would love to boil the karela and stuff it with methi and besan mixed with namak, chilli and a hint of turmeric powder and I would patiently fry it and pack it off for someone's tiffin. The love with which we do small things for people we love, that's often how we remember those who've left us. Who've left us either for another world for another person, we remember them for their gentleness in those close, small moments when they filled our glass with water in between the meal and when they added just the right amount of sugar to our milk that evening,, it is those genteel details with which we remember them, and this movie so beautifully recognises and places these moments in a thread.. a thread coherent enough for a 22 year old me to have felt moved in a way I had known.
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Another reason why I watch these movies and the way I watch them is that these are conversations I have the uppermost control over. I have the last say in them no matter what the characters say. I can pause, stop, shut, rewind, forward, replay-anything depending on my whim and my whim alone. I get to call the shots and I call them wisply on these soft movies that whisper to me during turbulent times. I shush them when my mind is racing far too ahead for me to catch up with the movie or when am way too behind latching on to a conversation that happened with someone ages ago.. I can shift the gears and I can write about these characters and memorise them, by the rote too, if the need be and maybe become them by ebbing so much to and fro between their and my worlds...