Food is the start of all great love stories, from Once Again, The Lunchbox to In The Mood for Love

“Good food is like music you can taste, color you can smell.” Ratatouille gets us. In this series ‘Food for Film,’ we pick food films/shows that make our mouths water and our souls richer.

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The best love stories stem out of loneliness. The best love stories start with food. Take any of them — The Lunchbox, In the Mood for Love, or Once Again.

Food and loneliness are a potent combination, brimming with possibilities. More often than not, it brings together two unlikely people, who would not have met if their hearts and stomachs weren’t so starved.

The premise is predictable. Two people going about their life, unattached, trying to make sense of the deafening silence, the gnawing absence, trying to fill it with food, which ultimately does nourish their withered hearts.

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All it takes is one wrong delivery of the lunchbox or a chance telephonic conversation with one of your restaurant customers. The premise is predictable. And yet, it makes magic. Each time.

I was 24, working with a national newspaper in Lutyens’ Delhi. He was 28. He sat across from me, only his bald head and dark eyes visible behind his monitor screen. Life in a newsroom can be tough and extremely lonely, more so if you don’t have a knack for making small talk and gushing over someone’s new handbag or gorgeous work outfit. It gets worse if your daily subsistence depends on tasteless, nutrition-less, calorie and oil-laden cafeteria or roadside food.

One afternoon, after a particularly difficult argument with my team head, I stormed out of the building to get some coffee, fresh air, and hopefully, perspective. When I returned, in front of my monitor was a big Tupperware box. I opened it. It had vanilla ice cream whipped together with large mango chunks. Simple. Delicious. Brilliant. What genius. It had a note —“All of this is for you. Eat guilt-free. You’ll feel better.” I filled my spoon generously. Put it in my mouth. Closed my eyes for one long moment. I then looked around. I could only see the top of his shiny head and his eyes. They were smiling. No. They were grinning. I grinned back.

Beginnings are unexpected. Beginnings are beautiful. Take Tara Shetty and Amar Kumar’s from Once Again, for instance. A widowed mother of two grown adults, one about to get married, she runs a small, nondescript restaurant in Mumbai. He, meanwhile, is a divorced superstar. He gets his food from her eatery, cooked painstakingly by her. After they are done with their day, they call each other and talk. About anything and everything. His apprehension about a dance sequence he’s shooting, his search for meaning, her prepping for her son’s wedding with her frugal means. They have been talking on the phone for a year. They are yet to meet.

Kanwal Sethi’s 2018 Netflix film is a meditation on the need for companionship, conversations, and the search for meaning. He uses food and Mumbai’s chaos to convey what cannot be said but is deeply felt — the frustration, the agony, the helplessness, and the quiet amid all the noise. Every time Shefali Shah ’s Tara is in her restaurant kitchen, cooking, her hair half undone, her face sweaty, fingers nimble, seeped deep in masalas and other ingredients, her melancholy and tiredness are as palpable as the food she’s preparing. You can touch it, taste it.

On one of their calls, she tells Neeraj Kabi’s Amar, “Ek point hamesha aata hai jab mujhe pata chal jata hai ki khana kaisa hoga — achha, kharab, ya bohot achha.” [There always comes a point when I can tell how the food would be — good, bad, or excellent]. Isn’t that true of love too? Much like seasons, we can tell when it changes. We almost always know the day, the date, the moment when it does.

I don’t cook. He didn’t either. He learned. But I didn’t know it then. For he would bring delicious South Indian food in his tiffin each day, which we would eat together in our office cafeteria. Idli sambhar, dosa, some vegetable curry he loved growing up and asked the recipe from his mother the previous night. A Rajasthani girl from Jaipur and a Marathi boy from Hyderabad, showing care through food in a city we were both new to.

He’d laugh that feeding the hungry brought good karma. It did. On our first few dates, we ate all across Delhi —Connaught Place, Jama Masjid, Chandni Chowk, Khan Market, Hauz Khas Village, Noida — happily gorging on all that India’s capital had to offer, marveling at the rich diversity, discussing our favourite food stories growing up, our mother’s signature dishes, our culinary pet peeves, with our bellies and our hearts full.

When I left Delhi a month later, on my last day at work, I kept a pizza box on his desk when he was not around. It had half a pizza. I’d eaten the other half. On the lid, I scribbled, “Because we live in a hungry world.”

Read more from the series  here .

[caption id=“attachment_10273431” align=“alignnone” width=“640”]  Food for Film. Illustration by Poorti Purohit[/caption] When not reading books or watching films, Sneha Bengani writes about them. She tweets at @benganiwrites.