Page 151 - WINE DINE AND TRAVEL SPRING 2023 SPECIAL CRUISE EDTION

collection of the Progressive Artists Group,
which flourished after World War II but faded
when its most successful moved to Paris and
London.
For a trip into history in the middle of a mod-
ern city, we watched the Dabbawalas at work, a
service started in the late 1800s to deliver
home-cooked native food for lunch to migrant
workers who didn’t have dining options near
where they worked. A dabbawala collects his
group of lunches in the morning from homes or
restaurants, goes to a transfer point such as at
Churchgate Station, where we watched the
dabbawalas sort the tiffins, or boxes, into
groups according to color coding systems on
each box (no mobile phone apps!). They deliver
to trains or other modes of transportation to
the next destination, where other dabbawalas
retrieve the boxes and deliver to the homes or
offices on their route for the workers to enjoy,
then return after lunch to pick up the tiffins
and reverse the process. They claim only one or
two missed deliveries every month or so. In
Mumbai, some 4,500 to 5,000 dabbawalas de-
liver 175,000 to 200,000 lunch boxes each
workday. The dabbawalas belong to a union,
pay dues and are guaranteed a job for life.
After a traditional Indian lunch, we stopped
by Dhobi Ghat, a hand laundry for the ages. It
includes rows of concrete wash pens, many cov-
ered with plastic tarps and each with a flogging
stone. Water hoses snake through the site and
it looks like unmitigated chaos. But there is
method to the madness. Bundles of laundry
come from restaurants, hotels and organiza-
tions. Clothes of different colors, types of ma-
terial and customer collections go from the
hand washing to starching, drying and ironing.
Workers scurry beneath the drying lines, ad-
justing, picking and folding, with bands of color
spread across the site.

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