And
I’ve just returned from watching The Lunchbox.
Strange
it is how sometimes things happening around you are not motivation enough to
write but a contrived screenplay of a couple of hours on the big screen forces
you to send your brain cells for a little jog or may be a leisurely saunter in
the by-lanes of your mind, so far blocked or ignored in life’s humdrum.
I
knew the story would not appeal to my husband, so I tagged along a couple of my
girlfriends. We had seen Lootera and although he enjoyed it, he went weary with
the pace. The Lunchbox seemed even tardier, like a soft uncertain wind trying
to raise its head in a placid backdrop but bogged down before it can rise,
managing only to rustle a few already withered or on-the-verge-of-crumpling
leaves. Most people can’t relate to sentiments, especially when we are used to
of motion or suppression.
I
loved the movie.
Perhaps
because I am, at a certain level one such leaf watching autumn slowly color my
evergreen pride?
Perhaps
because the idea of two people who are absolute strangers getting to bond
through a thread of simple conversations, is not new skin for me?
Perhaps
because as a woman I could relate to the restlessness in Ila’s form that wants
to be heard, wants to be important and seeks a purpose of this all?
Perhaps
because as a human I could empathize with Mr. Fernandez, a man who knows how to
take care of himself but yearns to be taken care of?
Irrfan’s
character is heart-warming, a face in the crowd yet subconsciously refusing to accept
being one. He looked into that bathroom mirror and said that the space smelt of
his grandfather and stiflingly comprehended that he was that grandfather ~ it
was nothing short of a revelation for anyone who beholds such a marvelous conceptualization.
He says he realized then he had turned old. Here was a man welcoming an early
retirement, a man who lost his wife to old age and the same man who did not
fathom when old age dawned on him. How amazingly well captured an emotion it
was that only someone on this side of the fence would relate to!
Do
we really realize how gradually age catches up on us? One day we are twenty and
things move on, like a whirlwind sometimes and like the standstill of waters at
the other. While weighed down in the twenties to establish our identity and
lives, all too soon, thirty knocks at our door. We open the gates and let him
in, as though it was in guise of opportunity, with a bit of apprehensions and some
exhilaration too, for such a thing is anticipation. Little by little every day
the same old drudgery as nothing changes and then one fine day we are forty and
out of the blue everything’s changed forever.
But
does the person who live inside the aging body really change? His aspirations,
his fancies, his dreams, his desires, they remain ageless. He molds himself to
the accepted beliefs of the society to behave in a certain mature way because
that’s what adults do, to think in a grown up manner, to give up on particular
things because it is the way the wheels of the society turn. He surrenders considering
perhaps his aging bones too weak to stand before the frail fingers that could
be raised. But the heart ~ It still remains at some threshold where it found
its identity and continues to stay there. It just loses its legs or will to
move on.
How
empty are lives that get trapped in the wheels of earning a livelihood everyday
so they have no time to stop and stare even at each other perhaps? And then
some other voids that just make you stop and stare at them, having no
motivation to stop doing it? Lives that have within their grasp everything a normal
person should be glad to have and yet feel like sand hastening through the gaping
edges of the begging palm.
I
remember in the early years of my marriage I would leave little notes in my
husband’s lunchbox, his office pouch, his wallet, his cupboard drawer, etc.-something
that would remind him of me out of the blue and make him smile. Yes, a hopeless
romantic like that. I would put up a picture of someone with open arms asking for
an embrace or a sticker that said “I want you every day” in the inner cupboard
door to catch his eye as soon as he’d open it. I would send him random messages
of “miss you” at particular times to build the stimulation of meeting me upon
reaching home eventually. I don’t know when I stopped. I don’t know when it
began to seem that he had more important things to do than get bothered by
inconsequential notes popping every now and then, every here and somewhere.
We
give up and give in without realization.
When
the protagonist says he should have looked at his wife laughing at those now forlorn
serials a bit longer, my heart went out to him. Why do we realize we should
have loved a little more, laughed a little longer, lived a little livelier only
when it is no longer possible to do so?
I
came across arguments on Twitter that stated had it been an aging woman and a
young man in the same scenario, the society would have not been so generous in
accepting it. Sad, that we want acceptance of the society for every bloody
thing. They fail to realize that it’s not so much a matter of an old man and a
young woman, or a married woman and a single man and other such classifications.
Marital status or age is immaterial here. It’s the matter of two mortals trying
to haul out their individuality through a reflection of similar needs in each
other; the acceptance that such an unearthing of oneself is possible at any
milestone in life and through our co-passengers in this journey, whether they
boarded on the same route with us or not.
I
was quite glad that the director here did not make a moral issue out of the
entire predicament where the characters find themselves. When the man writes
back to her asking if she would go to Bhutan with him, I quite anticipated a
horrified Indian woman sentimentality surfacing that would go aghast at the
idea of having crossed the line or even of its thought crossing her mind.
I
silently rejoiced when she didn’t.
It
is distressing to see people judge others without knowing what places in life
they come from. What’s wrong with an old man finding a girlfriend? How is it
morally a crime if a married woman finds solace in someone’s words outside the
bounds of her matrimony that the dwindling threads of it fail to ensure? What right
do we have to stop someone from getting happiness from whatever that redeems
him unless we have better ways to ensuring it for him that pleases his hungry
soul?
It’s
a love deprived epoch that we live in,
Where
money is easy to get and people difficult to find!
Where
faces abound but familiarity fails!
Where
we laugh too often but smile too less!
We
live in a world where living it up is not thought as much as finishing it all
up. Yes, the streaks of such ideas cross by even the sanest of minds. Like she
said, we all find ourselves at some point or the other, ready to take the
plunge but the depths to which we would have to fall, freezes our feet and
numbs the mind. We continue where we are, allowing it to lead to a slow,
excruciating death than a sudden, end-all one.
Little
battles of little people. Millions of lunchboxes opening every day and so do
millions of hearts. And day after day, without a second glance, with eyes
riveted to some other priority each time, they come to a close. And the sun
sets and the sun rises and the fan on the ceiling continues to sway.
