Tiffin Trauma

My current obsession is tiffin. Having almost secured a flat with a balcony, more on that in another post, the next thing I need to move closer to being a real Indian is a tiffin.

Tiffin is the most peculiar of things: something so rooted in the Indian DNA but such a juxtaposition in the work place where discussions on the use of Generative AI are held over a couple of stainless steel tins of vegetables and curry that some poor woman started cooking in the early hours of the morning. And yes, in my extensive survey of about 7 people, it has always been a woman who has made the tiffin.

If you have never watched the film "The Lunchbox", a 2013 Indian movie starring the late, taken too soon, brilliant actor Irfan Khan, and the equally brilliant Nimrat Kaur, then this is your homework from this blog. Find it on whatever streaming platform you can, and enjoy.

The Lunchbox received international acclaim at the Cannes and Toronto film festivals but it really upset the tiffinwallahs of Mumbai who were adamant that the whole premise of the movie, that a tiffin, made daily by a young wife, gets delivered repeatedly to the wrong recipient, just could not happen! (There is obviously way more to the movie than that, but I don't want to spoil it for you).

Anyway the tiffinwallahs who manage everyday to collect a freshly made tiffin from a home in the suburbs and deliver it to the office worker in the city in time for their lunch deserve their very own blog, and if I find them I will tell you more about them.

Meanwhile back to the workplace tiffin. A couple of weekends ago I went to the DMart supermarket on a reconnaissance mission and I happened to stumble upon an aisle of plastic containers. I purchased a tiffin size one for the princely sum of about ₹150 - approx a quid in old money - which even had a second tiny box inside for tiny tiffin goods.

Delighted with my purchase I brought it back to the hotel room with great expectations. The reality is less Great Expectations but more Oliver Twist. Or to be precise, Artful Dodger. I am purloining items at breakfast to put into my plastic tiffin or I am requesting doggy bags from restaurants to decant leftovers into my precious plastic box once back in my hotel room! It has become a daily stress... what can I put in my tiffin for tomorrow?

Until I get my bank account I cannot purchase food in the food court at the office and nor can I keep asking my no-tiffin mates to buy my lunch every day! But with 18 days still to go before I can get into my new flat and make use of my own kitchen to create a London style tiffin each day, tiffin trauma is very real.

I live for the days when I have a meeting where lunch is provided. I've had two of those and the food was amazing !

Catered Lunch Tiffin:

But even when I've had success filling my tiffin it somehow is never quite right. I sat down at a table in the Pantry on Monday this week with my lunchbox filled with leftover biryani from Sunday dinner which I thought looked really good. Tiffin etiquette in my office is to put your tiffin containers in the middle of the table and everyone shares whatever people have brought in. So I sat down with my chicken biryani, invited my non-veg tablemates to help themselves only to be told that on Monday, Thursday and Saturday no-one eats non-veg, and on no day ever does anyone eat leftovers. That's not a thing at all. Far better that someone in the family gets up at 5:00am to make fresh curries! And then make more fresh curries at 8:00 at night!

Oh and if you are trying to identify my plastic tiffin box in amongst all those in the picture above then you have not read my blogs in order. That is the pile of tiffins, washed up by the Pantry staff and left there for people to collect on their way home. Mam's tiffin gets washed and delivered back to her desk because she cannot possible identity her own tiffin and then carry it all the way back to her desk!