Each school day the dabbawala delivered a fresh, hot, home-cooked lunch to Jasmine Sheth (and many others), each dish packed into a stack of three circular aluminum tins, or tiffins, with roti on the side, a salted lassi, and something sweet. The food itself was cooked every morning by her mother, and sent off via Mumbai’s sprawling lunchbox delivery system by bicycle and rail. The tins returned the same way each evening.
There were thousands of dabbawalas, or “lunchbox persons,” working each day in the city, but in spite of the system’s dizzying scope—the connection was personal. “I adored my dabbawala,” she recalls. “He always was such a jolly old man. He’d bring me raw mango and tamarind pods sprinkled with salt and chili, because he knew I loved snacking on it. Dabbawalas tend to develop close friendships with their clients because they sometimes work the same route for years.”
