Finding an understanding soul in a sea of people is a concept universally loved

Almost every day in Mumbai

, roughly 130,000 denizens partake in a century-old tradition of eating a home-cooked hot meal for their noontime break rather than hitting up the closest deli or food truck for lunch. The lunches, encased in stackable circular metal containers called

dabbas

, are ferried from one's home to one's office (and back again) by a massive, coordinated network of

dabbawalas

, carriers who don all-white uniforms and who work rain or shine.

Dabbawalas

use bikes, trains, and wooden carts to transport the meals, and the containers are sorted by painted-on codes indicating specifics like railway stations, office buildings, and floor numbers. The delivery system rarely fails or errs-its accuracy is so remarkable, it prompted a study by Harvard Business School professor Stefan Thomke in 2012.

At one point in Ritesh Batra's directorial debut,

The Lunchbox

, our heroine, Ila (Nimrat Kaur), confronts her

dabbawala

about how he's been botching her route, dropping off her laboriously prepared meals to the wrong man. The nameless

dabbawala

insists that cannot be and contends that people from Harvard came to Mumbai and did a study; Ila cuts him off in mid-sentence: "Forget about them. Listen to me. Try to understand what I'm saying. This lunchbox that I give to you does not go to my husband. Instead it goes to someone else, who has been eating it."

Unbeknownst to Ila's

dabbawala

, for some time her exquisite meals and the

dabba

have been the sole means of communication between Ila and a near-stranger, Saajan (Irrfan Khan, familiar from

Life of Pi

and

Slumdog Millionaire

). Ila slips in a brief personal note to Saajan with naan (charred on her own stovetop) every time she makes lunch. He writes back to her. She's let the mishap go unchecked because of the cold reception she gets from her husband, whom she was trying to win over with food.

It's the connection between Ila and Saajan, a widowed accountant on the verge of retirement, that forms the heart of

The Lunchbox

, an endearing, somewhat old-fashioned film. The movie looks at loneliness and the quest for an outlet to soothe that pain, leaving out compulsive text messages and online dating. The exchanges shared by Ila and Saajan contain no graphic details or outsize proclamations of affection, but they do constitute an intimacy between the two. Early on, Ila confesses her husband's lack of interest in her, and Saajan soon acknowledges his wife's passing, telling Ila that he found himself watching her old VHS recordings of TV sitcoms for an inexplicable reason.

The Lunchbox

's devices-homemade meals and handwritten notes-can seem almost as foreign as the lunch service that facilitates the soft-spoken romance that sparks up between Ila and Saajan. Nonetheless, the beauty of finding an understanding soul in a sea of people is a concept universally loved.