Peter’s Blog for May

“Sometimes the wrong train can get you to the right station”

This film is about resurrection or about someone who is more dead than alive being brought back to life again through the love of two people. The film centres on Saajan who works in a big insurance company and is about to retire after 35 years service. He is a widower who has no children and feels he has little to live for. The early scenes of the film in which we see Saajan clinging to the handrails of the crowded commuter carriage or smoking on the terrace of his home at night, personify loneliness. This experience of him is intensified as we see him at home and all he has to listen to is the bustle of life in the streets and the sights and sounds of families all around him enjoying their evening meal. At work he never talks to anyone and in the cafeteria where he dines he is always on his own.

Shaikh
The first of the two people who gave him a new way of looking at life is Shaikh, the young man who is to replace Saajan when he retires. He and Saajan are a study in contrasting personalities, for where the older man is dull and yet utterly reIlable the younger one is a charmer but also a chancer. So, inspite of initially being rebuffed by Saajan a number of times Shaikh gradually breaks down his defences with his charm offensive and slowly gains admittance to Saajan’s table in the cafeteria. Even though he brings only an apple and a banana to their shared meals he shames Saajan into sharing the delights of his much more elaborate meal.

 

It is around their meals together that their relationship develops as Saajan begins to share not only his food but something of his story in the easeful atmosphere that their shared meal provides. Underelying all they share is an experience of the affection they both hunger for. This need is given more significance when Shaikh reveals that he is an orphan. In spite of all his buoyancy he is in search of a father figure and Saajan gradually assumes this role, even standing in for Shaikh’s parents at his wedding.

 

Ila
The second relationship that brings Saajan back to life also has food as an essential ingredient. This food is delivered each day in a container that is prepared by the families of the office workers or in Saajan’s case by someone he employs to do this. Initially the person who made the film planned to base it on the people who operate this highly organised business so in this film a lot of attention is given to how it works and to the amazing reIlability of the service. Fortuitously, one day Saajan receives a lunchbox which has gone astray and its contents brings him the first moment of enjoyment we see him entering into in the film. When this stray lunchbox continues to arrive on Saajan’s desk each day, much to the surprise of those around him, he immediatly takes time out and surrenders to the sensuous auroma of his lunchbox. But his thoughts soon begin to turn to the person who prepared it and so starts a regular exchange of notes with Ila who is the origin of these delightful meals.

Food for the spirit as well as the body
Ila is married and has one child but her relationship with her husband is a troubled one. He has lost interest in her because as Ila realises from the perfume on his shirts he is having an affair. In spite of this neglect Ila finds life in her relationship with her daughter and in a delightful one she has with her aunt who lives in the apartment directly over her own. They are so sensitive and responsive to each other that they personify Aristotle’s definition of friends being one soul in two bodies; they are not only conscious of what is going on in each other’s kitchens but in each other’s minds and hearts as well. Most of their conversation is about food and one realises that much of the film brings out how intimately meals are connected with relationships and how these are nourished by the conversations these meals can provide a space for. Much of the love we receive in life is expressed through food and the time, energy and resourcefulness that goes into preparing it.

The stuff of love

The daily stream of meals
And the love that prepares them
Are food for body and spirit
The care that creates and sustains us.

Meals are a celebration
Of birth, of marriage, of death
The most intimate moments of life
And each day’s coming together

Food is the stuff of love
To the eye that sees and is sensitive
To the heart that is not indifferent
But ready to praise and be grateful.

It is significant that Ila’s family watch television during their meals. Does this reflect the tendency of technology and the kind of instant intimacy it favours to intrude into an important time nature gives us to communicate and thus cultivate our more intimate relationships?

Love’s fantasies give way to reality
As the momentum of Ila’s relationship with Saajan develops we look forward to a time when they meet but it is part of the subtly constructed conclusion of the film that they never do. At an earlier stage in their relationship they had a vague plan to go off together to a place where they envisaged themselves living happily ever after. He fantasizes about this for some time and about all that it promises. But when they eventually do agree to meet we see her sitting in the resturant awaiting his arrival we know that the fantasy has been overtaken by reality for he does not join her. Instead we see him in the resturant watching her and we later learn why he decides against meeting her. It is because he realises how young and beautiful she is and that he as an old man could never fulfill her dreams. Instead, he decides to go back to where he has lived and to make the most of the ordinary relationships that Ila and Shaikh have taught him to make the most of.

A love spoken in everyday language
Saajan no longer feels he has to escape to some place far away from his present circumstances but that he can find a quiet joy entering into the ordinary relationships that are part of each day. For example, we see him sitting with a group of men who are chanting and it is obvious that he is enjoying himself. Again on the bus that takes him to work he graciously accepts a seat that is offered to him by a young man who calls him “Uncle”. He has begun to live out the Greek legend about how it is Care or Love who makes and sustains us as long as we live.

It is Care that makes and sustains us
Care was crossing a river one day when she took some soft mud and shaped it into a human being. She wanted to give what she had made her own name but Earth also laid claim to this right. It was, after all, of Earth that the human being was formed. Care then asked Jupiter, who was pas¬sing by, to give her creation a spirit. This he gladly agreed to do but then he too wanted it cal¬led after him. They decided to ask Sa¬t¬urn to be arbiter and he gave the following decision, which see¬med a wise one. Jupiter had given it spirit, so he would receive that back when death came. Since it was of earth or humus that it was fashioned, it would be called a human being. How¬ever, since Care had formed this human be¬ing, it would be her role, as long as this being lived, to continue to make and sustain it.

12 Years A Slave star Lupita Nyong’o

The ordinary is “afire with God”
As the film comes to an end we see how Saajan enters into three elements of Care or of a resurrected love that has begun to shape his life anew. We realise that he is coming to accept that he is as people see him, elderly and soon to retire from the work that till recently had been what he had lived a minimal existence for. He is also coming to appreciate the person that Ila and Shaikh have discovered to him and to live in the environment that peoples’ concern for him provides. Having had time to absorb the love shown him by Ila and Shaikh he now has eyes to find this love in the ordinary words and gestures in which he experiences it each day. In the light of this experience he sees everything around him differently or that, in the words of Elizabeth Browning, “earth’s crammed with heaven and every bush afire with God”. He feels the pulse of life in everything as he returns to the place where he has lived for many years and knows it afresh or as if for the first time.

With the drawing of this Love
And the voice of this Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T S Eliot

Joy is the basic measure of how healthy our relationships are

This story of how love, which Saajan thought he had lost, returns and brings him back to life is beautifully told in the film Lunchbox. It echoes something that is basic to all our stories. This according to Joseph Campbell, who for me is the greatest authority on the stories people tell, is the journey each of us is on. He sees this journey as our innate quest for love and for the intimacy and joy that the attractiveness or beauty of this love draws us into. This dream or object of life’s essential quest is something our parents gave us our first taste of in the way that their love created the intimacy of home and the contentment we found there. When we leave home we become responsible for maintaining this dream our parents initiated. If we do not keep alive our experience of the love we have received in life, then, like Saajan, we will experience a sense of loneliness and sadness when through neglect we get cut off from Care as the one who enlivens us. The book of Wisdom warns us of the danger of forgetting or of being out of touch with the love that is the making of us, the love the Word of God aims to reveal.

… sinking into deep forgetfulness,
they get cut off from your kindness.
No herb, no poultice healed them,
But it was your word, Lord, which heals all.
(Wisdom 16:11-12)

It is to explore the role that Care or love plays in our own story that over the past year I have been working on ways of becoming aware of and believing in this essential source of human sustenance. You will find what I have come up with under COURSES in the main menu of my website; It is entitled, What do YOU want?

The gist of the course
The course invites us to outline the significant events of our story and then to notice and put words on how the significant people in it have loved and related with us. To explore how rich and varied our experience of love is we then explore nine forms this love commonly takes as we move through life. We are very famiIlar with these nine from the time we were children, fell in love and developed close friendships. Finally, we explore ways we can gradually appropriate or believe in the love we have received and given in life. “All you need is love”

All this affection can lie dormant

Hidden treasure
The two people who loved Saajan back to life were probably only arousing a love that due to life’s hardships had become dormant. Once it was aroused all kinds of experiences could put him in touch with his accumulated experience of love and maintain an environment in which he was happy.

When I give courses, there are two songs I use that never fail to make people want to sing along. One of these is Abba’s, I Have A Dream and the other is the Beatles singing All You Need Is Love. The following words always find an echo in peoples’ minds and hearts and they abandon themselves to the somewhat naive simplicity of the song. But after all “It is Care that makes and sustains us”.

Nothing you can know that isn’t known.
Nothing you can see that isn’t shown.
Nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be.
It’s easy.

Chorus
All you need is love (All together, now!)
All you need is love (Everybody!)
All you need is love, love.
Love is all you need (love is all you need).