Mumbai's size and inconvenient shape create all kind of hassles for its working population - not least having to stew for over four hours each day in slow municipal transport. One thing the daily tidal wave of commuters do not have to worry about, however, is finding an inexpensive and wholesome home-cooked lunch. In a city with a wallah for everything, it will find them. The members of the Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Association , known colloquially, and with no little affection, as " dabawallahs ", see to that. Every day, around 4000 dabawallahs deliver freshly cooked food from 125,000 suburban kitchens to offices in the downtown area. Each lunch is prepared early in the morning by a devoted wife or mother while her husband or son is enduring the crush on the train. She arranges the rice, dhal, subzi , curd and parathas into cylindrical aluminium trays, stacks them on top of one another and clips them together with a neat little handle. This tiffin box , not unlike a slim paint tin, is the lynchpin of the whole operation. When the runner calls to collect it in the morning, he uses a special colour code on the lid to tell him where the lunch has to go. At the end of his round, he carries all the boxes to the nearest railway station and hands them over to other dabawallahs for the trip into town. Between leaving the wife and reaching its final destination, the tiffin box will pass through at least half a dozen different pairs of hands, carried on heads, shoulder-poles, bicycle handlebars and in the brightly decorated handcarts that plough with such insouciance through the midday traffic. Tins are rarely, if ever, lost, and always find their way home again (before the husband returns from work) to be washed up for the next day's lunch.

 

To catch dabawallahs in action, head for VT or Churchgate stations around late morning time, when the tiffin boxes arrive in the city centre. The event is accompanied by a chorus of "lafka! lafka!" - "hurry! hurry!" - as the dabawallahs , recognizable in their white Nehru caps and baggy khaki shorts, rush to make their lunch-hour deadlines. Most collect about one rupee for each tin they handle, netting around Rs1000 per month in total. Daba lunches still work out a good deal cheaper than meals taken in the city restaurants, saving precious paise for the middle-income workers who use the system, and providing a livelihood for the legions of poorer immigrants from the Pune area who operate it.