Bombay’s Lunch Box Brigade

BOMBAY, India —  Lunch hour descends on this humid commercial city, and the archaic hustle begins.

A thousand men pour from the old British train stations, all shouldering the same shiny cargo and all wearing the same frantic stare.

They glance at their watches, mount their bikes and disperse into the traffic and heat.

Minutes later, in an air-conditioned office, Rajesh Sori takes his delivery: a six-course lunch, spirited from the suburbs so carefully that his favorite Indian foods, dal and chapati, still glow with the warmth of home.

“I only eat home-cooked food,” Sori, 34, says, sighing. “Food cooked by my wife.”

The man who has made this possible--the man who met Sori’s wife at her door at exactly 8:45 a.m., cradled the lunch through the chaos of the Bombay trains and handed it off to another courier, who pedaled it across the city and into the diamond grader’s hands at exactly 12:45 p.m.--considers the money he has earned for his efforts:

About 12 cents.

“It’s hard work,” says Vitthal Dhra, 40, a sinewy father of two. “But I couldn’t get this job in the village.”

Dhra is known as a dabbawallah, one of the legion of mostly illiterate, mostly village-born men who scratch out a life by toting hot, home-cooked lunches from Bombay’s sprawling suburbs to middle-class office workers downtown for a few rupees a day. The dabbawallahs are one of Bombay’s oldest and quirkiest institutions, sustained by a ceaseless stream of cheap labor, one of the world’s most extensive commuter train networks and the historical willingness of Indian wives to stay home and cook.

Today, as this urban area of 15 million crashes into the modern age, the dabbawallahs are feeling left behind. More women work outside the home and don’t have time to cook. Fast-food joints are popping up between the office buildings. As businesses toughen themselves for Western competition, fewer employees have the time to dig into multi-course lunches.

Many of Bombay’s dabbawallahs say their services are needed less and less, no matter how fast they pedal.

“When I started, I had much more business,” says Govind Bhosle, a gaunt dabbawallah pausing outside Bombay’s grandiose Churchgate Station.

Bhosle, who migrated from an Indian village 30 years ago, pedals his bicycle to 35 houses each morning, carries the lunches through a maze of trains and delivers them by bike to office workers downtown. All the while, he follows an elaborate system of colors and codes handed down by generations of dabbawallahs.

“More and more people tell me they don’t need me anymore,” Bhosle says.

And still the prospective wallahs arrive, pouring out of India’s impoverished villages into a labor pool so large that dabbawallahs like Bhosle must always fend off new competitors scouring their neighborhoods for clients.

At Bay Bites, a sandwich stand squeezed between Bombay’s modern office buildings and the Arabian Sea, some doubt whether the dabbawallahs will last into the next century.

“My father ate a hot lunch cooked at home every day for 40 years,” accountant Nani Daruwala says between bites of a mutton burger. “Times have changed. Lifestyles have changed. My wife works. We don’t have time.”

Long History of Service

The term dabbawallah derives from the Hindi words dabba, for the bucket-sized metal containers, or tiffins, that most of them use, and wallah, which means, roughly, “guy.”

India’s cities are full of wallahs of every sort, performing unpleasant tasks or selling meager items for pathetic salaries. Dhobiwallahs do laundry by hand, usually for about 5 cents per piece. Bidiwallahs sell cigarettes and betel, the leaves many Indians like to chew as a stimulant. Dodhwallahs deliver milk.

The dabbawallahs, who number between 1,000 and 5,000, are exclusive to Bombay, India’s commercial center. They grew up around the city’s extensive commuter train network, begun by the British in the 19th century, which ferries 5.5 million people a day to and from their jobs.

The collection and distribution of the tiffins each day is a miracle of timing and organization performed by a work force that, almost to a man, cannot read or write.

“I’ve been having my lunch brought from home for 13 years, and I think they’ve failed to bring it on time maybe three times,” says Dominic D’Souza, a clerk in a Bombay textile firm.

The sky is still pink over Bombay when Baban Iyerkar checks the air in his tires before starting on his way. Iyerkar lives in a tin hut with eight other people in an encampment called Kutir Sangam, which nudges one of Bombay’s nicer neighborhoods. Kutir Sangam smells of filth and closeness, its 3,000 settlers working and living in pools of muddy water that remain for days after the rains.

Like many dabbawallahs, Iyerkar is a migrant to Bombay. He was born in a village of about 200 called Rajunagar in the state of Maharashtra, of which Bombay is the capital, and came to the city five years ago, drawn by a dabbawallah friend who helped him get started.

In that way, Iyerkar, 35, is not unlike the hundreds of thousands of Indians who have moved to Bombay in recent years, crowding into slums like Kutir Sangam with little more than a piece of tar paper for a home.

By some estimates, four in every 10 Bombay residents moved here, and half are either homeless or live in hovels and huts.

Iyerkar’s wife and three children still live in Rajunagar, where he returns every couple of months.

“As long as I send money home, they don’t miss me much,” Iyerkar says with a small smile.

Iyerkar, in white flapping pajamas and Nehru cap, pedals his bulky black bicycle for 25 minutes before coming to his first pickup. It is 7:45 a.m.--he is right on time. Pallu Madhavlal comes to the door, tiffin in hand.

Iyerkar hooks the tiffin on his bike and begun pedaling to his next stop 10 minutes away. There he meets Jyoti Desai, who hands him a tiffin full of the Indian culinary pillars: rice, cabbage, chapati and dal. She has prepared the feast for her daughter, Vibha, a bank clerk.

“What’s a mother for?” Desai asks, heading back inside.

An Intricate System

And so Iyerkar continues, pedaling and collecting, for the next three hours, riding nearly 10 miles, gathering 30 tiffins in all, until he reaches the Santa Cruz station just in time to make the 10:34 a.m. train to downtown.

In the minutes before the train comes, Iyerkar parks his bike and puts his 30-pound load onto a wooden pallet. The train arrives, stopping for 10 seconds, long enough for Iyerkar to shove himself and his cargo past the crush of riders and into a car.

The 40-minute ride into Churchgate Station provides Iyerkar one of his few respites from a day of nearly ceaseless work. Yet, like many dabbawallahs interviewed for this story, he complains only when prodded.

For Iyerkar, it’s the apartments without elevators.

“In most buildings, I have one customer,” Iyerkar says inside the bouncing train car. “In some, I have to walk up and down four sets of stairs.”

Throughout the journey--throughout the day--Iyerkar glances repeatedly at his watch, the essential accouterment of the dabbawallah. Like the others, he is part of a team--his has 22 members--that has divided up most of the suburbs of Bombay. On the train ride, dabbawallahs are leaping on and off at every stop.

The crucial--and most esoteric--part of his day comes when he arrives, at 11:15 a.m., at Churchgate Station in downtown Bombay. Each morning, and almost at once, hundreds of dabbawallahs converge at the city’s 96 train stations and split up into their teams.

Just as Iyerkar collects his tiffins in a certain suburb, so he is assigned to deliver tiffins to a specific section of downtown Bombay. When the teams converge, they swap their tiffins according to the color codes atop each lunch box.

Once understood, the symbols tell the wallahs everything they need to know: where the tiffin should be picked up, whether and to whom it should be handed off and where it should be delivered.

“If we’re not on time, we’re finished,” says Janardan Gavanda, a 31-year-old dabbawallah.

Loaded with his final batch of tiffins, Iyerkar mounts his second bicycle, stored at Churchgate, and pedals into the steaming Bombay traffic. By 12:30 p.m., he has delivered most of his lunches, some in insulated tiffins to ensure that they are warm on delivery.

Up and down Raheja Chambers, the 12-story building where Iyerkar has deposited the tiffins, the mostly male office workers are digging in.

“You have to understand the Indian mentality,” says Madhav Anchan, a jewelry merchant. “Indian men will always prefer to eat food cooked at home.”

These days, however, it’s getting harder to find women willing--or able--to cook.

“I just don’t have time,” says Mitsu Viyas, a 29-year-old wife, mother and secretary.

Still, enough tradition remains in Bombay to keep Iyerkar in business. For his efforts, he receives the equivalent of about $3.75 a month per customer. With 30 paying customers, that means he is bringing home just over $28.50 a week. That’s the limit, Iyerkar says: Any more customers and he wouldn’t be able to deliver on time.

As the people in the office buildings eat their lunches, Iyerkar takes his second break. He sits with a couple of other wallahs in a shaded stairwell of one of the office buildings, out of the sun, saying nothing.

At 1:30, Iyerkar is up again, collecting his tiffins, hooking them to his bike to begin the routine in reverse. He will cycle back to the train, ride it to Santa Cruz, pedal the 10-mile loop, dropping off each tiffin at the house of its owner. He will finish, he hopes, by 6 p.m.

Lifting himself onto his bike, Iyerkar says he’ll do this job as long his body will let him--and as long as there are people who want their lunches delivered hot.

“When I’m too old, I’ll go back to my village and work the fields.”