The white Amaze stops at Manaveeyam Lane, Thiruvananthapuram. Passersby stop to look at the curious design on it — a man carrying a red box on a scooter, a picture of the Secretariat and the Padmanabha Swamy temple in the background. A dabbawala, they say, in Thiruvananthapuram. Sreejith Jayan then steps out of the car, looking a tad worn out from an obvious lot of running around. There are only days for the Vova Dabbawala to begin service, and in the last four months, he has received so many calls and enquiries that there are some 60 deliveries to make every day.
“We had no idea that it would catch up so fast,” Sreejith says. For a lot of people — film lovers especially — dabbawala is something you watched in that movie The Lunchbox, something that happens in faraway Mumbai, where lunchboxes are packed and a man comes to collect it from home and another man delivers at workplaces. It began in Mumbai, way back in the 1880s when, according to stories on the internet, a Parsi banker got an errand boy to deliver his homemade lunch and others got inspired to do the same. The errand boy — Mahadeo Havaji Bachche — became the founder of the Mumbai dabbawala system. It took many decades for a young man in Thiruvananthapuram to think of a replica. “It was watching my mother work so hard that made me think. She has to get up as early as 4 am, to make our lunches at home before we leave early for work. And she is not always well, with BP and everything,” Sreejith says.
Sreejith Jayan (Photo: A.V. Muzafar)
He wanted to begin it as a service. Like his mother Bindu, there were so many women — working women among them — who had to give up sleep and get meals for the whole family ready and packed by 8 or 9 in the morning. Bringing the dabbawala system would give them time. “We’d start picking up by 11 am and deliver the lunchboxes before 1.15 pm,” Sreejith says. For now, they have split the city into four branches — Peroorkada, Thiruvallam, Kazhakoottam and Poojappura. “Poojappura will be the hub where we bring all the boxes we collect, put it in our paper bags and then tag them and put barcode on them before delivering,” he says.
Sreejith, who worked as a driver in Kuwait before and then came back to start a cab service in Thiruvananthapuram, has roped in his friend Prajeeth P. Das. They will have 10 employees taking the lunch packets in ten two-wheelers and four cars. “We also plan to launch the service in Kochi by August 15,” Sreejith adds.
