The Tiffin by Mahtab Narsimhan

The Tiffin is an beautifully crafted story about a young boy full of courage, integrity and hope written by Bombay-born Canadian author,  Mahtab Narsimhan. 

The story opens in April, 1982,  with the hint of tragedy about to befall a young unmarried woman, Anahita Patel. She has written a note to her lover, Anurag Parekh, telling him she has to meet him that very night. She placed the note in between two warm chapatis, in his tiffin, a tin lunchbox which is delivered by dabbawallas throughout the city of Bombay. The note bears shocking news which Anahita must get to Anurag and the safest way to do this is to place it in his lunch. 

When her regular dabbawalla, Amit is sick, Anahita is concerned that her tiffin might get lost or stolen -  almost unheard of. It is a foreshadowing of what is to come. The tiffin must get to Anurag Parekh at Mittal Towers, Nariman Point.  The replacement dabbawalla assures Anahita the tiffin will be delivered.

At Andheri Station, the tiffins are sorted by a group of men under the direction of Vinayak. He is concerned about Amit's replacement, who is now late. He arrives late at the train station, the tiffins are quickly sorted and as the train starts to leave, they are loaded on with the dabbawallas. But Amit's replacement was the last to get on, struggling to pull in the carrier containing the tiffins. As the train passed a telephone pole, the carrier hit it and a tiffin at the very end fell out onto a wooden sleeper. In a one in six million chance, Anahita's tiffin doesn't make the train to Bombay and is lost, with tragic consequences.

The novel skips ahead thirteen years to tell the story of a boy named Kunal who works as a waiter in a Bombay dhaba (restaurant) named Bombay Bahar. The Bombay Bahar supplies food for customer's tiffins, which are then sent to the train station and into the center of Bombay. Over two hundred thousand tiffins are delivered precisely at noon daily usually without ever losing a lunch box.

Kunal's life is not a happy one. He has been told that he is an orphan, dumped on the doorstep of Mrs. Seth and her husband, Sethji who own the dhaba. Kunal is given little to eat, often beaten, verbally abused and there are suggestions that he is enduring sexual harassment by both customers and some staff because he is very good looking. Kunal doesn't like Badri, the new cook who has eyes only for him, while one of the waiters harasses him. Lalan, the dishwasher tries to protect him.   Kunal does have one friend though, and that is the older Vinayak, a dabbawalla who frequents the dhaba for breakfast every day. 

Kunal tells Vinayak he'd rather be a dabbawalla than a waiter, but Vinayak tells him every job has good and bad points. Kunal reveals to Vinayak that he plans on leaving the dhaba. As he goes to serve an order, another hulking customer comments about Kunal's attractiveness and makes a derogatory comment about his mother. This causes Kunal to drop the plates. He challenges the customer, leading Seth to get involved. He smacks Kunal, calls him a liar, and orders him to apologize. However, Vinayak comes quickly to Kunal's aid, telling Seth that Kunal is an honest boy. He tells Seth if he's not fair, he will speak to the Dabbawalla Association about seeking another supplier for the tiffins. Mrs. Seth eventually diffuses the situation but the customer threatens Kunal with revenge. 

The dhaba fills tiffins everyday which will be delivered to their owners at noon. After carrying the tiffins to the entrance, Kunal asks Vinayak if he can help him sort them. Vinayak agrees and explains to Kunal how the number-letter combination on the tiffin works. Vinayak offers Kunal a place of refuge if he should ever need one, telling him his address and that he can get to his chawl within ten minutes. 

The next day begins as any other, with Kunal serving customers, wiping down tables and avoiding the leering customers and their rude comments. Sethji sends Kunal on a delivery to Pandit Road. After making the delivery, Kunal decides to check out the "...gaudy, pink house halfway down... " Mangal Lane - a place all the older boys spoke about. He wants to know why many of the boys want to make the deliveries to Mangal Lane. On his way there, Kunal sees Vinayak drinking in a bar and is surprised. 

Kunal returns from his delivery and shortly after Lalan arrives at the dhaba badly beaten, having been robbed. He tells Lalan that he is leaving for good. This news is devastating to Kunal because Lalan has been protecting him from the advances of the dhaba's cook, Badri. He panics and is outside trying to process what this means, when Sethji catches him and tells him that he will stay an extra hour that night helping Badri clean the kitchen. This further crushes Kunal. 

Sent out on a delivery, Kunal knows he cannot return to the dhaba and so he makes the decision to flee to Vinaya's chawl. When he arrives at the old man's room, he realizes Vinaya has been drinking. Kunal asks to stay with him for a few days and if Vinayak can get him work as a dabbawalla. But Vinaya tells him it's not so easy. After Vinayak falls asleep, Kuna returns to the dhaba to retrieve his mother's green bangle and the money he believes Sethji owes him in wages.  

Kunal returns to the dhaba, steals about three thousand rupees from the till but is caught by Sethji,  who viciously beats him and locks him up. Mrs. Seth comes and tells Kunal he must leave quickly because Sethji is planning to sell him to Abdulla, known as the Beggar King, a vicious man who cuts off the legs of young boys to make them into pitiful beggars. With the help of Mrs Seth, Vinayak comes to take Kunal away but he is determined that Mrs. Seth tell him about his mother after she reveals that she should never have helped his her. Although he initially leaves with Vinayak, Kunal runs back, insistent that Mrs. Seth tell him what she knows. She gives Kunal a letter his mother, Anahita Patel, a financial analyst in the downtown area, gave her. Gurpreet Seth tells Kunal that she tried unsuccessfully to track his mother down. Suddenly Sethji storms into the room, but as he attempts to reach Kunal, Gurpreet slams the door giving Kunal time to flee. From the letter, Kunal learns that the Seth's took in Kunal  temporarily to help his mother as she tried to locate Anurag. When she never returned, he was left to his fate, and became a virtual slave in the Seth dhaba. This shocking revelation changes the direction of Kunal's life but fills him with hope. His deepest desire in life has been to be a part of a family and be loved. He believes the only way to achieve this is to find his mother.

From this point on, the novel tells the story of Kunal's attempt to find his long lost mother. With the help of Vinayak, Kunal learns the work of a tiffin carrier and devises an audacious plan to locate his mother. Will he succeed in what seems to be an impossible task and find the family he so desperately desires?

Discussion

The Tiffin is a novel that explores the concept of family amidst the backdrop of extreme poverty in India. Kunal is a boy who has spent the first twelve years of his life believing he is an orphan only to learn that his mother left him with Mrs. Seth, with the intention of returning to get him. Something happened to prevent her return. Once he learns the truth about his birth, Kunal becomes determined to find his mother, in the hopes she will want him. Both Mrs. Seth and Vinayak warn Kunal about trying to find his mother, telling him she has abandoned him and will likely not want him. His determination to find his mother blinds him to the family he has.

Kunal wants to become a dabbawalla so he can find his mother. He knows from the letter that his mother's tiffin was likely lost and that she left him with Gurpreet while she tried to find his father. The revelation of the lost tiffin leads Kunal to believe this is the key to finding his mother. To do that he needs to become a dabbawalla and then once he finds her he won't need these people anymore. Being a dabbawalla is a means to an end - to find his mother and be a part of a family. "He did not belong to their family and they hadn't included him in their celebrations. With any luck he'd have someone of his own, soon. Then he wouldn't need any of them, or Vinayak, ever again. "  It is at a meeting of the Association of Dabbawallas that Kunal hits on the idea of the notes in the tiffins. He will need to be a dabbawalla to do this, however, Kunal is initially rejected by the dabbawalla community who do not accept anyone who is not a Maharashtrian. A heroic deed by Kunal leads to all the dabbawallas helping him in his quest to find his mother, by printing out notes to be placed in the tiffins that will be sent to the financial district. 

As Kunal becomes single-mindedly focused on locating his mother, events play out between him and Vinayak in such a way that Kunal comes to realize that he already has the family he so desperately wants. It was Vinayak who "had taught him to read and write by smuggling an alphabet book and writing paper to him, and always looking out for him. " Vinayak reveals to Kunal that he too suffered a loss twelve years ago - his wife and son who were killed in a rickshaw accident. Despite the possibility that his mother has been located, Kunal agrees to stay with the elderly dabbawalla.

Kunal realizes this was the right choice when he returns to Vinayak's chawl to find a young woman waiting outside. Kunal knows this is likely his mother, but she says nothing and does nothing. "Say something, he thought. Say what I've waited twelve years to hear. The thudding of his heart was loud in his ears and he willed it to soften. He didn't want to miss a word. But she said nothing."  Instead, she asks for directions to the train station and quickly leaves. It is not the meeting Kunal was expecting. There is no room for Kunal in her life in contrast to Vinayak who has made room for him. He realizes this is what Vinayak had been trying to tell him about his mother - that she may not want him back. 

Nikhil not realizing that Kunal has just seen his mother, offers to take him to the Mittal Towers in the morning to see his mother. Kunal refuses. "His mother's face swam before his eyes, crumpled with pain yet, strangely, devoid of love. He remembered the deep satisfaction in Vinayak's when Kunal had accepted his offer to stay." He tells Nikhil he already has a family - with Vinayak. While it's not the ending the reader is hoping for, it does offer the opportunity to explore the concept of what makes a family. For some it might not be a biological parent but those who truly care. 

It's interesting that Nikhil discovers Kunal's mother at the Mittal Towers, which is where Anurag Parekh lived thirteen years earlier. This suggests that Kunal's mother may still be with Anurag, and that perhaps the reason she cannot take her son back, is not that she doesn't love him, but that maybe Anurag doesn't know of his existence. In the letter to Gurpreet Seth, Anahita states that her  mother sent her away to have the baby when she learned she was pregnant. It's possible that Anahita has a life now with Anurag and that taking in a son she abandoned may cause her problems.

Narsimhan has crafted an engaging novel with a realistic cast of characters: honest, innocent Kunal,  cruel Sethji who views Kunal as a slave, kindly Vinayak who offers Kunal refuge, and the hardworking dabbawallas who are committed to delivering thousands of lunch tiffins exactly on time every day.

The Tiffin offers young readers a rich portrait of life in poor Bombay. The author describes the sights, sounds and smells of life in the slums of the city. Descriptions of large black rats, the stench from the sewers and sweaty bodies, the beggar children whose legs have been amputated to make them more pitiful, the trains crowded with people sitting inches from the electrical wires are just some of the images Narsimhan offers. In Andheri Station, Vinayak and Kunal are pushed along by streams of people. "Vendors pushed gaudy plastic combs, cheap watches, and newspapers under their noses. Beggars ran to and fro harassing commuters for money, blessing and cursing them in the same breath. The smell of rancid oil and burnt milk hung in the air."  

Also included is a portrayal of the work of the dabbawallas, who rush to the train station with their carriers full of tiffins, each labelled, to be sorted by destination. This is hard work, which must be done exactly to maintain the near perfect record of never losing a tiffin. Not many North Americans know about tiffin lunches, although some restaurants now offer this service. The tiffin is used in India and some other areas of southeast Asia. It is a tin lunch box which at least two separate compartments for storing food. The food can be made hot and will keep warm for up to three hours. Wives of workers often make their husband's lunches or they can be supplied by a restaurant. The tiffins are then delivered by tiffin wallas, usually by train to all parts of the city with incredibly efficiency. Lost tiffins are rare.  Mahtab Narsimhan's novel is a great way to introduce an important aspect of Indian culture to Canadian readers.

Narsimhan grew up in Bombay and lived there for twenty five years. Now living in Toronto, Canada, she is an accomplished author who began her writing career in 2004. This novel is highly recommended for young teens.

Book Details:
The Tiffin by Mahtab Narsimhan
Toronto: Cormorant Books     2011
192 pp.