The Tiffin Carrier Man

The Tiffin Carrier Man arrived around noon. You could not set your watch or guarantee the precise moment he arrived but the noises of his arrival, the clanging of the metal food carriers and the way he pushed open the door to the office, signaled that the lunch hour was near.

In the office, hunched over their desks, the clerks become restive, stirred by the noises and the aroma of freshly cooked food. Their eyes turn furtively to the clock hanging over the Chief Clerk’s table. The Chief Clerk, sitting on his raised platform with a commanding view of the whole office, scrapes his chair on the floor in warning. Not time yet, not time yet for lunch.

The lunch hour divided the working day, made bearable the tedious hours spent posting stock cards with the movement of materials between a multitude of divisions that made up the organisation. One hour away from the desk was a liberation from tedium and not just a time for sustenance or the exercise of an employment right.

Not everyone had their lunch in the office canteen. In those days in the Sixties, for Muthukannu and several others like him, home was the place for food. Eating in a shop food cooked by strangers was a repugnant thought. How would you know who cooked it and what hands touched the food that you put into your mouth? The Tiffin Carrier service was the answer to their needs. Home cooked food was placed in a tiffin carrier that consisted of small deep round trays held together by a steel frame that also served as a handle. Each tray in the carrier contained a different part of the full lunch meal; the rice in the bottom tray, over it the tray with the curry, then the vegetables and so on. The full lunch with all the different dishes in different trays were tiered vertically to become the tiffin carrier. The Tiffin Carrier man collected the carriers from the homes, place them in a large basket attached to the back of his bicycle and delivered it to the office in time for lunch.

There was a time when office workers were able to go back home for lunch, have their meal and get back to work before the end of the lunch hour. Special ‘office buses’ designated for the journey home ferried you to and from the office. If home was outside the route of the office bus and you still insisted on home food, you had no choice but to either bring your lunch with you when you came to work or had it delivered by the Tiffin Carrier service.

Muthukannu and others like him were a diminishing group even in the Sixties. Offices where people worked were getting more distant from the places they lived. The emerging phenomenon of the rush hour at noon made ferrying staff to and from office during the one hour allocated for lunch impossible. The office buses disappeared. Traffic jams and an expanding city with receding suburbs marooned people in their workplace at the lunch hour. They had to fend for lunch in canteens and eating places in the vicinity of the working place. Taboos about eating outside were slowly being eroded at the same time; over the years these taboos will be forgotten and replaced by the growth of a fetish in public eating.

At the time that the events narrated here took place, only three tiffin carriers were delivered to the office. Most of the other twenty or so people who worked there ate at the office canteen where Gomul Naidu cooked breakfast and lunch and rustled up snacks for tea. There was a rumour that Gomul Naidu was a night-soil carrier by night and the canteen was his second job. Once when someone asked him if this was true he had a whole ladle of cooked cabbage thrown in his face. ‘Next time you ask me that question, I will throw on your face not cabbage but that which you say I carry in the night’, Gomul Naidu warned. There was an inquiry into the altercation but Gomul Naidu got off with just a warning, but the rumour remained unresolved.

Another incident that happened around that time was whispered in the office for years after the era of the Tiffin Carrier Man ended. As with all such incidents, there were several versions of what actually happened but one fact was common to all, which was that one afternoon, the Tiffin Carrier Man delivered not one but two tiffin carriers to Muthukannu.

At lunch time, others sitting in the canteen with their lunch noticed the two carriers on the table where Muthukannu sat. Muthukannu apparently served himself from both boxes and then invited one of the office boys to share the food with him. Every day after that, Muthukannu received two boxes for lunch. It became his practice every day to share his food with one or other of the two Office Boys who worked in the office.

There was of course much speculation about the two lunch boxes arriving for one man. Muthukannu did not bother to explain anything. The boxes arrived without fail every day and every day Muthukannu shared their contents with the Office Boys. He offered no explanation to anyone, including the boys, and the boys were not eager to let their curiosity get the better of a good home-cooked lunch.

Muthukannu was not a gregarious fellow, had few friends and it was unlikely that he would confide with any one on the matter. Pillay, one of the older clerks in the office said that Muthukannu had told him that the second box was from his mother. Whether or not Pillay was to be believed, the explanation had a ring of possibility about it. Two years before the event, Muthukannu had married a girl of his mother’s choice but the marriage had been a disappointment to the mother. The girl she chose for her son apparently had her own mind about marriage and life generally. When things got bad between the two women, Muthukannu’s wife, against the convention of their community, insisted on moving out of his mother’s house and setting up home with her husband. In the absence of a more convincing explanation, people were contented to assume that the second box was the mother’s way of holding on to her son.

As the days passed, interest in the two tiffin carriers ebbed; no one noticed the anomaly anymore. The office boys made it their habit to claim the second box, ate whatever there was in it, cleaned it and had it ready for collection at the end of the day.

Muthukannu continued to remain aloof from his colleagues. He made no attempt to get close to the others in the office. If he spoke to any of them, it was only about matters that concerned work. He was sociable enough to take pains to attend office functions, eat with the others whenever a festival was celebrated in the office and when it was his birthday, dutifully bought chicken pies from the Western restaurant in town for all his colleagues, which was what the others did on their birthdays. Such social reciprocities are never deemed to be acts of friendship.

In all the years that he was employed in the office, only once did Muthukannu speak about matters that did not concern his work in the office. This happened at a forum organized by the employees’ union on a proposed new law to make all marriages in the country monogamous. The law as it stood at that time recognized a man’s right to marry more than one spouse if it was permitted by the customs of his community or religion. The new law was to change all that. A married man would be prohibited by law from taking another wife while the earlier marriage subsisted. If he married against the law, the second wife would be denied of any rights of inheritance. Muthukannu spoke with great passion about the unfairness of the changes that were being proposed. How can the law determine who a man’s wife is, he asked? How can the law chose one only if a man had other wives? Who is the law protecting and who is it punishing? What business is it of the law to peer into such personal matters as marriage, he demanded. Those who heard Muthukannu at the meeting were astonished, not by what he had said, but the force and eloquence of his speech. He was cheered widely after his speech but before his colleagues could seek him, he had slipped out of the hall where the meeting was held. The new law was eventually passed. It became an offence to take a second wife during the tenure of the first.

The people in the office changed over the years. Some were transferred to other offices; others were promoted to new positions; some died and some retired; new employees, young men and women took over their positions. The building was demolished and a new one erected that had many floors and several lifts. The office was moved to one of the many floors in the new building. A new canteen was established on the top floor of the new building. Time passed. The Tiffin Carrier Man not only disappeared but was forgotten altogether.

Many years later, Muthukannu’s death was announced in the back pages of the newspaper where the obituaries are usually published. There were in fact two announcements of his death appearing on the same page. The details of the message in both announcements were the same; the name of the deceased, the office where he had worked and retired from and the far away country where he died, these were all the same. What was different in the two announcements were the names of the widow and the children.