SALAAM BOMBAY! & THE LUNCHBOX — Mira Nair & Ritesh Batra deliver realism and romance

Heads up, this episode includes a little bit of adult language, a lot of caffeine, and spoilers. Sometime in the mid-1980s, a documentarian named Mira Nayir was in her birth country of India, specifically the "Megacity of Mumbai" sometimes called Bombay. And she's sitting in a cab, stopped at a traffic light, when she notices a kid coming towards her. The first image that I saw was a young man who didn't have his legs. He had made a revolving board on rubber wheels that he would park himself on. That sadly wasn't unusual. Mumbai's full of disadvantaged street kids, fending for themselves by any means necessary. But what happened next wasn't so usual. The kid reached out, and suddenly. who was this gnarled hand holding onto my taxi cab window in the middle of a traffic jam in Mumbai. And the lights turned green, and we started moving, and I was terrified for this child who was holding on. But with such glee that he knew exactly how to let go, and then how to pirouette on his makeshift platform. That idea of finding some kind of flamboyance and a performative glee, with having absolutely literally nothing, no legs, no nothing, was just a something I'll never forget. And that made me start thinking. Yeah, a few years later, Mira Nayir made her breakthrough fiction feature about a resilient Mumbai street kid. But instead of heavy traffic, she had her hero navigate another potentially treacherous side of the city. The world of tea delivery. I'm Rico Goliano, welcome back to the movie podcast. Movies the global film company, The Champions Great Cinema. On this show we tell you the stories behind great cinema. Today we finish up season 10, we've been calling it a feast for the eyes. Just in time for your holiday dinners, we've been digging into how and why so many filmmakers put food at the center of their movies. And today it's kind of a double feature. I talked to two US-based Indian directors who years apart made very different films, both set in Mumbai's notorious food delivery systems. Everything is hand-delivered in India. We had Instacart way before you guys thought of it. You already met the legendary Mira Nayir, maker of essential movies like Mississippi, Masala, starring a young tensile Washington. Later you'll hear us talk about that and about her amazing debut feature, Salam Bombay, a street level view of Mumbai through the eyes of a tea boy. Plus, a little bit about the dining habits of her son, New York's mayor-elect, Zoran Mamdani. But first up, we're going to hear from the maker of a beloved romance inspired by a beloved Mumbai lunch tradition. It's just kind of the spoof-ex system that's existed for over 100 years. It survived everything. Ritesh Bhattra tells me about his 2013 hit The Lunchbox and about Mumbai's crack lunchbox delivery army known as Dabbalwalas. The lunchbox was such a smash, it's now in rehearsals as a stage musical by the way. I spoke to Ritesh via video chat and it was clear right away he's his into food off screen as on. [Music] First of all, I love that you're actually eating and having a coffee while I'm talking to you. It's like perfect. What do you have? What's the snack? I'm having a brownie. But I'm always eating something. It seems to me like I'm always snacking. Really? You know, it gets me to my day. Anything particular about the brownie? Nothing. It's nothing exciting. It's just available in the kitchen. Sometimes you just got to survive. Let's go back to the beginning of this project. Tell me about the moment that you thought about Dabbalwalas for a movie. I left India when I was 18 back in '98 and of course I have a family there so I keep going back regularly. Of course I grew up watching the Dabbalwalas but I feel like when you leave and you come back, you see things in the way that you didn't see them before. Then I really noticed them and I was like, oh this is really interesting. It's an interesting part of this city that I just took for granted. Then I just started doing rounds with them. My original intention was to just follow them around and see if I should make a documentary about them. For those who, you know, like many of our listeners I think are not based in India. Where did this come from? Why is it such a thing? And it's particularly to Mumbai, right? Yeah. You know, Bombay, it's a long city like Manhattan, you know. And like Manhattan, all the offices are concentrated downtown. The residences are up north. So it's a system that evolved organically for the needs of the city. And then you know when Bombay was formed, people from all over India came there. Everybody has their own food. Everybody wants to eat their own food. Back in the day there was not like different kinds of restaurants. So people preferred, you know, home food. And then the thing with Indian food is it's not a sandwich, you know. It needs to be eaten fresh, you know. It's not something you can pack in a plastic foil and you know, send it along. A lot of sauces. Yeah. So the men would leave for work. And then if a woman would cook the lunch, put it in a lunch box. The lunch box delivery guy collects it and delivers it fresh to the man's desk, you know. And then delivers it back. So when I was following the lunch box delivery guys, I started hearing these snippets of stories, you know, like how some guy bought movie tickets for a movie he wanted to see with his wife later. He sent back the movie tickets in the lunch box, you know. And I surprised for her, hey, this is what you're going to do in the evening. And then the letters and stuff. So I was like, well, what if a lunch box connected to strangers, you know. Describe the system involved with getting all of these individual lunch boxes to I'm guessing hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of individual desks. I mean, you know, the system is kind of like a black box. There's these codes on lunch boxes that only the lunch box delivery guys know what they mean. And we filmed it for the movie in all its glory and all its steps. Yeah. In an opening sequence of the lunch box, we see the lonely hero in Ila, painstakingly boxing up a lunch for her husband. Which you can tell is falling out of love with her. The lunch box gets picked up by a dabawala on a bike. And then we're off on a tour through Mumbai. As the lunch box gets tagged, packaged up with other lunch boxes, then hustled by other dabawalas onto trains through rainy streets, and finally distributed by a final dabawala to the office desk of the wrong guy, a lonely widower on the verge of retirement, played by the late great Airfan Khan, who unlike Ila's husband finds the food she's cooked amazing. And they start exchanging notes in lunch box and then love story blooms and transforms both their lives. We try to show that this thing never goes wrong, yet cosmically, miraculously, it goes wrong with this one delivery. But yeah, I think describing the system is almost like Kano intuitive to talking about it. It's just kind of this perfect system that's existed for over 100 years. It's survived everything, survived the liberalization of the economy, people having choices, is still keeps going. So why not do it as a doc, as originally planned? I just, I'm not a. I've started many docs and abandoned them. It's just not my jam, it's just not my thing. Though I love documentaries and like the doc, all the beauty and bloodshed as a couple of years ago, it's just poetry. What's that about? It's about the opioid crisis. But I just kind of thrive in this art form of narrative. I just like to make shit up, I guess, you know. But there was just a great gift, you know, to get into it, thinking it was gonna be a doc, to learn it intimately, and then to weave a fictional story out of it. Well let's talk about that story because interestingly, the couple are pretty much never in the same room together. Yeah, in the movie they know never set eyes on each other. The two lead characters and they will see each other, except for once from a distant set of restaurant where they're supposed to meet. What was the point where you decided these guys are never going to meet? And not the easiest story problem to solve at that point. I love story without people ever hanging out there. You know, I didn't even think of it as a story problem. I just thought of it as that's what it is, you know. Kind of them seeing each other would ruin the magic of the thing. There's also a character in the movie called "Auntie" who lives above the protagonist, Ela, in the apartment above her. And we never see her. We see a basket that basically represents that character that comes up and down, you know. Yeah. But I didn't know like I was talking about a little girl about this the other day, because she was talking to me about whether we would see her in the stage musical. Now I was just telling her that story telling is as much as about what you show as it is about what you don't show. The things you decide not to show are just as important. It's true. I mean in a way though, it also is saying something about the modern world that people, it's so hard for people to actually communicate face to face anymore. I mean this movie was made a while ago, but in a way it's sort of envisioning the world we're in now where everything is mediated. We're divorced from each other somehow and trying to come together. Yeah. I think there's an old world in us to these characters and they communicate through letters. At the time we made it of course there was phones and emails and you know Facebook and stuff. But they never deviate from sort of the old worldliness of letters. Old world, yeah. Yeah, and when you watch the movie, when you experience the characters, you don't question it. Because they just seem not going with souls, you know. They talk about old things. They talk about how things used to be in simpler times. Is this like wish fulfillment for you in a way? It's like also double-well as this is something that's been around for a hundred years. It's kind of like you were longing for a quiet. It's also a very quiet film. Was that going on for you, longing for a simpler time? You know, for me personally, and it doesn't matter so much because now it's a movie and people watch it and they take from it what they will, right? But when I made it, it was a very nostalgic thing for me because I had been away from India now for, when I made it for about 12 to 14 years. And now I've been away for even longer, trending on 25, right? But at the time I was very nostalgic about Bombay and about India and stuff. So from me, the whole movie came from a place of nostalgia. It's a nostalgia that's reflected too in the food the characters eat, the way they eat it, and how and where it's prepared. So far this season, just about all the movies we've talked about are about high-end dining, professional chefs who take even classic dishes and elevate them to perfection. Whereas Ela and really every cook in the film are just trying to make simple, everyday things to please the people they love. We put a lot of thought into the whole trajectory of the dishes she would cook for him. At first she makes her husband's favorite things and then she starts making his favorite things and then she starts shares things with him. Like she finds a recipe for a spring apple, a sub-z, vegetable dish with spring apples in her grandma's recipe book. So the movie is really about people showing themselves to each other and then we definitely use food as a device to do that. By the way, why spring apples as the truly nostalgic dish that she gets from her mother? It's also again, it's a very old-world thing, like that's something your grandma would make for you. Like a puzzle in Mexico is something that is comforting and your grandma would make that for you. And every culture there is something that only grandma's would cook, right? Another food thing, there's this moment where Irfan Khan's character, his co-worker, is chopping vegetables. And then the train home from work. Which is, I love the concept even though it doesn't seem particularly sanitary to me. Where did that concept come from? He's such a lovable character, but where'd you get that idea? But you know, I used to take the train to go to college when I was growing up. In Bombay at the time we had college after 10th grade. So 11th and 12th you know, I used to commute in the train. And oftentimes in the evening on the right back I used to see mostly women just chopping vegetables in the train. Because you know, these commutes are long, one hour, two hours and then you could just get home and cook, you know? I mean, it's a great idea. I'm just trying to imagine like a train full of people chopping onions. Like that could be a real problem. I saw it, oftentimes I saw people chopping vegetables in the train. But I just had fun with this because this character shakes character, does it? And he does it from a place of love for his wife. He gets home before her and he just wants to have the meat prepared for when she gets home. It's interesting that you say that because you're right. It's like every character is using food as a love language kind of. It's a method of communication. Yeah, you could say that. Is that conscious? Writing is never so conscious, but you know, at the end of it, after you're done and you look back at it, absolutely. Let me ask you something. We've been asking a lot of guests this season, how do you make food on film appetizing? Like for you, what is the process? What are the secrets? Usually shooting movies, a good part of shooting movies is pretty tedious. You know, a shooting food is just tedious. You know, shooting process is just tedious. You know, I remember telling you, you're a fan that because we shot with him first for like the first 15, 20 days of the shoot. And a lot of his scenes were alone by himself in the apartment. And that's very difficult for an actor. It's very tedious. And I remember telling him that, you know, you're getting off easy. Like, now we have to go and shoot all this food. The making of it, you know. By the way, was it, I mean, obviously it was actual food that he was eating. But I mean, I know that something that actors complain about is having to eat something over and over and over again for take after take. Was there anything done to mitigate that process for him? You know, he was, sadly, he left us a couple of years ago. We have died in 2020. Yeah. And he was a literal genius in terms of, you know, how he interacted with the camera. For I would say 90% of the time in that movie, he's eating pomegranates. What? And you can't tell. He's a magician. He's a magician. He would bite something off. And it is on camera. It's there. But you can't tell the slight of hand of that man and how he, how he knows how to, you know, work with the camera. I mean, it was something to behold, you know. Why the pomegranates? And because, you know, because they're healthy and he doesn't have to eat this stuff over and over, I've shot actors eating a lot, you know, with the course of my career. But never ever ever seen somebody being able to pull off pomegranates and they're eating something entirely different. I can actually, as I think about it, it's also because it like, there's texture to it. You can kind of nod it, but you're actually not ingesting all that much. It's mostly seed. Yeah. It has to be something that if you eat a whole bunch of it, you're not going to be gross now. Yeah. Yeah. And I thought full person. He's a very thoughtful person. That is genius. What did you eat on set, but is it as good as the food being cooked? No, pretty close, pretty close. You know, the best part about shooting in India is that the food is amazing. Yeah. The onset food is amazing. So when I'm not shooting in India, I really miss that. There's always like great chai on set, you know, and I'm pretty addicted to caffeine and chai. So like, it's always like, I feel like when I'm shooting in India, I just have to extend my hand out and somebody will hand me a chai. So just wherever you are. I really miss shooting in India. I want to stay for that reason. I'll also say I've been to India and I've been to Mumbai and there is a cinematic quality or at least a visual quality to the way food is presented there that is like nothing I've ever seen. I remember going to a place like just kind of a pretty standard gritty section of town. I'm walking down the street one night and there just happened to be a street market there. It's just like the vegetable vendors were laying out the food. It was like a geometric mandala of perfectly arranged multi-colored vegetables that just look more enticing than any vegetables I've ever seen. I live in California where there's a lot of really good vegetables. Yeah. I mean, it's such a big part of the culture and the being, you know, I mean, the hospitality is entirely based on feeding people. I feel like Indian people always, you know, you get them together and talking about the next meal. It's like, you know, you know, what are you having for lunch today? What have you had for dinner? You know, half of the conversation over a meal is about another meal. Yeah. It's always about the next meal though. I mean, it's nice. I have this theory that all human beings need is something to look forward to and it's kind of like that's a great way. Like every few hours you've got something to look forward to. Like it gets you through a tough day in a tough city. Tell me about the reception of the first of all. You're, this is, you know, in a lot of ways. This is not an epic film. It's a very small scale film. What were your expectations as far as its success? I mean, none to not much, I guess. I just wanted to get it done, honestly. I remember the cut not working and it was, we needed to turn something into Khan like in a month and it was just not working. And I sat down over Christmas that year and I wrote that last voice over and that made the movie work. We went back and we changed a bunch of things to earn that voice over. It unlocked something for me. So my whole attention was on that. But you know, like what's been surprising to me in ways that how the movie lives on after all these years, you know, now we're doing this stage musical, right? And then there's all these actors who were like kids when the movie came out. But they're like, oh, they, it's a big part of the childhood, you know, it's their parents' favorite movie. And they wanted to be part of this musical because, you know, it's somebody's dad's favorite movie or a mere couple of the other day who said that it was like, their first date, you know, when was your first inkling that this thing was going to do better than you may be allowed yourself to believe? Well, you know, we went to Khan that year and we got a bunch of big standing oations and then there's this award that's really charming that it's a real workers of France. They vote on the best movie. That to me was like a really nice, nice award to get is from because it's a movie about like nostalgia and old souls and then all the real wave occurs in France thinking that it's the best movie that year. It just felt so fitting. The railway workers give out no work. Yeah, yeah, they have this, it's called the Reildor. They awarded in Khan every year. I feel like that's the best price to get in Khan, you know, it's so cool. You can win the palm door, you can win the camera door, you can win any award in Khan best director, whatever I feel like, ring the Reildor is the real deal. It gave me real joy. Ritesh Bhattra, the stage musical of the lunch box, opens at Berkeley Rep in Northern California on May 27th, 2026. Coming up, we talked to Miranayir about a movie that probably isn't musical material, but it's got just as much to chew on. I'll look back at Salam Bombay, that's in just a minute, stay with us. Alright, everybody. Moobie is the global film company that champions great cinema bringing it to you wherever you are in as many ways as we possibly can. We stream movies, we produce them, we release them in theaters, movies from any country, from legendary otores or brilliant first-timers. We've always got something new for you to discover. And I want to tell you about a couple of things I think you will definitely want to discover after hearing this episode. First of all, a movie that many of the indie film lovers among you are probably already planning to see the new one from Jim Jarmish, one of the godfathers of American independent cinema. The movie is called "Father, Mother, Sister, Brother" and it is comedy drama in three segments, each one about a different estranged relationship happening in a different country. But guess what? The middle segment, set in the UK, revolves around two sisters sitting down for a fron afternoon with their mom over, yes, a genteel afternoon tea. In fact, coffee and tea are through line in all these segments. Also, those sisters are played by Kate Blanchett and Vicki Krebs. The mom is played by Charlotte Rampling, the film won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. I mean, I think that's probably all you need to hear to go see it. "Father, Mother, Sister, Brother" hits US theaters on December 24th. Also, I want to tell you that the movie we just talked about, the Lunch Box, that's now streaming on movie in the UK, Ireland, Australia and Latin America. So if you live in those places, subscribe to Mooby and Mooby.com. Make dinner for the person you love and have yourselves a great date night. We've got all the links and info you need about all of the stuff in the show notes of this episode, speaking of which, let's go back to finish up this episode and this season. So, like Ritesh Batra, when I first started my video chat with Mira Nair, she was in the middle of a caffeine fix pouring herself a cup of tea. Something she once wrote a whole essay about for The New York Times magazine. "Yeah, yeah, I can't live without tea." "Yeah, I can tell." "That's how this article begins. I cannot think without tea is the first line." And like the Lunch Box, her featured debut featured a lot of tea. But that is where the similarities end. "Salomba Mbe is the story of a 10-year-old named Krishna. His family has kicked him out of the house for accidentally destroying his brother's scooter." "So, at the beginning of the movie, he goes to a train station and asks for a ticket from the countryside to quote any big city. The station guy hands him back a ticket to Bombay." "Come back a movie star," he says. Prishniz plan is a little humbler than that. He's determined to earn 500 rupees, about 40 US bucks, which he sure will buy his way back into his family's affections. And to do it, he takes the one job a homeless kid from the sticks can land. "Chai Pao, which means tea boy." "Ey, Chai Pao!" "Chai!" And through delivering tea, through brothels and through train stations and through people's homes, he gets embroiled with different characters and streets and brothels of Bombay. Prishniz adventures take him to some pretty dark places, physically and psychologically, and every moment feels painfully real, which makes sense, given the way Nair cast it and shot it. "I come from the world of cinema Verhite, which is the cinema of truth. I began really as a person viewing real life, making documentaries on the streets with people in the struggles of our lives, especially in India. Anyway, that was my first fiction film, "Salam Bombay," but because I came from cinema Verhite, I worked with an amalgam of real street kids with some unknown but trained actors, but in the streets and in the brothels and in the graveyards of the city of Bombay in 1987, '88. "Now, since I've heard you describe yourself as making movies, quote, "across oceans," like a lot of them take place in multiple countries or they're about immigrants. Your first documentary out of film school was about an Indian immigrant to America. The two movies you made after this were about immigrants. Why make your first feature very grounded all in one city? It's specifically not a cross-ocean. Well, I am, you know, it's because my roots are strong that I can fly. I am born and raised in India. I happen to come to America on a scholarship when I was 18 years old, but my gaze and my politics has always been to make my art about what gets under my skin and doesn't let me go. So the resilience of our street children, of whom there are thousands, really inspired me. I mean, I'm always attracted, you know, to those who are considered marginal, because I think in them, I get inspired. Your mom was a social worker. I'm imagining this came in some part from her. Yes, she is a social worker still. She used to say no words, action. And it's funny that she said that because action is of course what starts every shot of a filmmaker's life, action. But it really was about that she was the wife of my father who is like an Indian civil servant. And you know, she was supposed to wear beautiful saris and play marjong, you know. But my mom, in addition to wearing beautiful saris and playing marjong, was always organizing, always wrapping up care packages for the soldiers on the border lines. She's a major, you know, influence on me and also on our son. Yeah, I can tell. You cast from the streets, as you mentioned before. Tell me about that process. How do you how do you pick from, you know, obviously, there's millions of kids in Bombay that are in this predicament? You know, India, we are riddled with class. We are riddled with coded behavior. You know, we live cheek by jowl between those who have and those who have nothing. And I did not in Salam Bombay. I did not, I wanted to only work with real street children because in their hands, in their eyes, in everything they have, they are the truth of what it is like to be part of this poverty. So I had no interest in looking for child actors. We rented a church in the basement of the church in the Grand Road, which is central Bombay, went out on the streets with a little piece of paper that said the address of our workshop. Those days, as ragpickers, they would make 25 rupees a day and we offered 50 rupees a day. What were they doing in Serenac pickers? They were being. Oh, they would go through what people here do with recycling things, you know, go through trash and find out what's recyclable and then sell the recyclable things like tins and cans and bottles. 129 street kids showed up and very quickly I wittled them down to 29. And for six weeks, we took out 29 kids and we put them through a 9 to 5 pacing, which started with yoga and dance and then debate. And I also showed them many films because the diet of entertainment in India is movies. The minute they make five rupees, they'd go to a movie. But that kind of Bollywood song, dance, fantastical extravaganza was the last thing I wanted to make. So acting, the word acting became a bad word in our workshop. If the kids would swagger along and sound like Amitabh Bachchan, the other kids would say, "Ara-yad, do acting, Karra," which is, you know, you fool your acting here, you're not yourself, you know. So then I brought the camera in and then mixed them with professional actors. Like the Pimp was played by Nana Particker. Now a great star. It was his first film then. In that process, I chose my protagonist. Who at their kit, unbelievable performance? Where did he come from? What was his background? He comes from Bangalore from South India, escaped alcoholic parents and he was just doing exactly what you see in the film. You know, sometime a rag picker, sometimes a waiter and weddings, that type of 18-erent life. What did you say in him? Oh my gosh. He, firstly, he was tough, you know, really toughened by the street. He was both a child and a loner. He had depths of mystery and that's something I'm always looking for in an actor. That was my first film. So I didn't even know how to identify it at the time except that when I would work with him, Shafiq Syed is his name. He would do what I asked, but there was a greater reservoir within him that I was deeply affected by. And then as we proceeded, you know, he slowly became more and more playful. But this reservoir was always within him. I've made movies now for 40 years. I've worked with so many kinds of actors and non-actors and real people. But this element of mystery, you know, this element of enigma that you don't fully know what they are feeling is a gold mine, you know, for an actor and for a director. That's what he and Denzel Washington, for instance, haven't common in your film. Yes, yes, so many. When did the choice come to make your lead character a chai pow? Very early on. Because a chai pow, a tea boy, is somebody who will take us through the different layers of life everywhere, Bombay. The chai pow traverses everything. And frankly, that was my first inspiration. The film before Salam Bombay was called India Cabaret, where I lived with three or four women who were strippers and dancers in a nightclub. And we would return home like two in the morning after they would finish their shifts. And when they would wake up in the morning at 12, a chai pa would be there to give them hot tea. And they would very sweetly and intimately tell this tea boy, dance for us like the men would have said to them the night before in the club. Yeah, and there's a scene in Salam Bombay where something like that happens. That. That was a big one. Krishna, I think, brings tea to this prostitute and her daughter during a rainstorm and the woman like dries him off. And mom, you need a gunner. And then they all end up dancing together. Yeah. And then they would say sing for us, like the men would come on the women to do the night before. And then this tea boy would tunelessly sing the one line he knew from the Bollywood disco songs and serve them tea. A tea boy goes through several worlds in the course of a day. I can imagine why tea is so important in India. Like the country produces, I think, the second, most amount of it of any country and on top of it, it was a colony of the the Brits who loved tea. What's the genesis do you know of this concept of hand delivering tea? Like we like coffee in the States, but you go get it or you brew it yourself. Everything is hand delivered in India. It really is true. Tea making is something that we consider very seriously, but it also takes like 15 to 20 minutes per making tea because you boil it with ginger and cardamom and water and milk and then tea and it has to brew properly, it has to cook and then you sift it and sieve it. It takes 20 minutes. I make it every morning so I know. - The saint just put in a bag in a cup. - No, no, no, that's what we call muzungutachai, which is the rest is white folk to it like that. - Sorry, it's not very artful the way we do it. - No, it's really, I've never had tea like that. But now, when I don't have time, I'm forced to. - It's also for us, it's really a point of camaraderie and a meeting place over Chai, all over even in smaller towns where your cigarettes are sold, you can order a chai. It's just our, as we call it, it's just our meeting point is around Chai. - I do want to ask you, was this system, at the time as the whole Chai-Pau system kind of predicated on this sort of exploited labor, like these kids, was there a quote unquote legitimate Chai-Pau network? - There is no union, like there are dabao alas where you can have a, it's a really amazing organization of those who take your lunches from home to the offices. But the Chai-Pau, the T-Boy is the lowest rung. It's the entry level job for a street kid, you know? - I ask because there's also a scene where the kids are, they clean up some guys chicken coops and the implications that like the food system is propped up on exploitation. So like this is our daily lives are undergirded by this exploitation. - Actually, if the kids did not have that employment of chicken cleaning and tea delivering, it would be a very miserable life for them, you know? I didn't regard it fully as only exploitation. I agree it is much cheaper labor than they would have to pay elsewhere. But with the kids being there, it's a way to make something, you know? Because otherwise you don't, you have nothing. (gentle music) - Nayir didn't leave her actors with nothing. With the proceeds from Salam Bombay, she set up a trust for them. And nearly 40 years later, it still supports Indian street kids. In fact her mom runs it. But for her next feature, Nayir returned to telling stories about immigrants, specifically Indians who come to America from Uganda. It shared one thing with her debut though, a lot of the action and metaphors revolved around food. (gentle music) - The idea of Mississippi masala actually was brewing before Salam Bombay. And I made Salam Bombay and when it became a hit, and people asked me, you know, what I would do next and they flung me every child of every hue in every country, as offers to make more Salam Bombay, I turned them all down and went back to this original idea about India means expulsion of the Asians in East Africa in 1972, the Asian community who had never gone to India, had suddenly to leave a place that they had known as home, Uganda. But the interesting trick of history was that many of the Ugandan Asian exiles actually came to Mississippi, Dirt for Mississippi, where they began to own motels because they were cheap and because they could employ their own families without necessarily knowing the language or whatever. And it was this extraordinary thing of hardly being able to find a white American owned motel in Mississippi. And Mississippi of course is the birthplace of the civil rights movement. - Yeah. - African American community who like the Indians in Uganda had never known the African continent as their home. And I kind of put these two things together to see, what if the young Ugandan Asian girl falls in love with an African American man in Mississippi? What would happen then? - Now the interesting thing to me is, or to germane to this conversation, is that the first scene set in America in the present day in this movie is in a grocery store. It's the first thing they're doing. - Bigly, weekly, no doubt. - It is. - The name of the grocery store. - And it is a bigly, weekly. And it reminded me actually of watching it of a movie that happened a few years earlier. There's a great scene in the movie Moscow on the Hudson where a Soviet immigrant to America is going through a grocery store. And there's so many choices that he passes out. This is, that's not what's happening here, but it is somehow it makes sense that a grocery store is placed with all this different food as a representation of America. Was that conscious? - Everything is conscious, my dear. Everything is deliberate. Because when I came to America, age 19, I had never been here before. And I quickly moved off campus. And I had to learn how to cook and I had to learn how to shop. And I remember my, I still distinctly remember my first visit to an American supermarket in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And it was just bewildering both in its primal colors as well as the insane variety of things, as well as the fact that everything was packaged beyond, I'm still appalled by the level of trash. I have to throw out on a daily basis after buying a bunch of tomatoes. Everything was so packaged. And I walked around looking for something that I could buy to cook, go eat. And I finally ended up only finding this thing which, it was my last name, Nair, or Nair. It's Nair is my last name, but I found this thing called Nair. And I said, okay, I'm exhausted with trying to find out what to buy. So let me just buy this Nair to you, whatever it is. And I bought it and it was just hair removal cream. Nair, it meant no hair. I have no idea. That's right. I remember it now. I just did not know how to shop for quite a long time. So your first experience that you're going to set these characters in is an aggro's restore? Well, yes, because it's only reasons. It's really a portrait of Americana, you know? And pigly, wiggly, I just couldn't get over the name of the franchise. It was, you know, and then just the contrast, you know, the what we as Indians purchase versus what other people do. I mean, Meena Sarita Chalzri's character was buying 24 gallons of milk. Yeah, for a wedding. Yeah, for a wedding. They had to prepare so many sweets, so many things that needs milk. Good afternoon. Half to noon. 25 gallons of milk, 10 buttermilk. Holy cow, you got me the dairy? And you know, things like that. He says, holy cow says the cash register guy, you know? Of course, not realizing that cows indeed are holy way I come from and so on and so forth. It was riddled with double meanings on several levels. Yes. And I mean, the name Mississippi masala masala is a blend of spices. And you right away see it in this grocery store. It's like these two Indian women who then are served by a white cashier. And then their food is bagged by a black guy. The grocery store is a masala. Exactly. And I also, you know, we grew up in India after independence from the British. We grew up on a diet of English literature and Russian literature, you know? I really wanted to have our words in the title. Yeah, yeah. So masala was perfect because it was really about the semalgam. And similarly with salam in salam Bombay, you know? The power of seeing one's own language on a marquee. There's no words for it, you know, when you're growing up in another country. Mississippi masala, although you do explore all the fault lines between races, I do think that it's ultimately fairly optimistic that people can get along. And I think about it now and a movie about immigrants set in the American South right now, I just would be a different movie today. And I wonder if you ever think about revisiting this. I mean, if Mrs. Sipi Masala were to be made today, there would be a lot more, I think, schisms, you know, real walls more than they were then, you know, between one community and other. Because it shows the racism in both communities, you know, all our communities really, about each other. And that actually the life is, you're speaking about food. I mean, look at the commonality of food in Mississippi. When Denzel's family gets together, it's barbecue, it's corn, it's about gathering over food. And it's exactly the same in the Asian family in the motels, when you gather for anything, for a wedding or a ritual, or just for evening prayers or nothing. It's all about, you know, the puries and the dolls and the food you share. But near the train would ever meet, except to clean their carpets. You know, and that was something that astonished me, our commonality and yet the distance between us. Well, listen, maybe on a happier note before I let you go, I should just, I should say congratulations on your sons or on election is mayor of New York. Thank you so much. Sure, you're very proud. Thank you. And I told you a couple of stories, which sort of you could see the own echoes in him, you know, which even surprised me, but the whole thing, he, the whole MAMDA and I, I mean, it's about say your name, you know, and say our name's right. Yeah. Oh my god, yeah, get it on the marquee right? It's a long tradition that he comes from. Absolutely. But by the way, I actually, I forgot, I was going to ask you this. He taught, it's unbelievable because he has asked more than any politician I've ever heard of what he eats in New York City. Yeah. What did he eat at home? I don't think anybody's asked like what's his favorite dish? Like when I would come home to my mom, she'd be like, what do you want me to cook you? And it was always pop roast because I'm a like, um, actually, actually bagels and locks and cream cheese and all that. It's very much a Sunday breakfast, believe it or not. Wonderful grilled salmon with steamed vegetables and and and and potatoes and Dylan, you know, so it's not always only Asian fare. Yeah. But at home, I essentially make, you know, keema mutter, which is like minced lamb with peas in a kind of stew. I make a lot of biryani. I make a very big rack of lamb, a barbecue Indian style for Thanksgiving. Do you have an egg dish, by the way, that we've been collecting egg dishes from filmmakers? Yes. We eat burji. It's called BHURGI. It's spice eggs with onion, tomato, coriander leaf, and you whip the eggs with flatbread or with none or with what from Gujarati bread we have called papula, which is very thin, made with fennigreek. It's like a peasant breakfast that is the tastiest one on earth, with of course some mango pickles. What are we doing with Shakshukha? This has got to be like the next brunch thing. Well, Shakshukha has borrowed on this idea of. Oh, okay. Ah, this is beta. (laughs) I'm sure lovers of Shakshukha will have something to say about that. I know. I've just having fun. (upbeat music) Mira Nair, she told me she is currently working on a Greenlit feature. Her first in several years, watch this space for more news on that. Until then, that's a wrap on the movie podcast for this season and this year. It has been an honor telling the stories of these tasty food films. If you haven't heard them all, go back a few episodes to hear my conversations with the lengths of Brad Bird talking about his Pixar classic "Rat to Tui". Meanwhile, we are gonna take a much needed end of your vacation, but follow us so you don't miss what we have in store for 2026, including a career-spanning conversation with the great Vim Vendors. If you are a regular listener, you've heard him on the show before and he's just the best. We talk about his love of movies, travel and rock 'n roll. Follow us, you're gonna love it. Meanwhile, let's roll credits. The movie podcast is written, hosted, and edited by me, Rico Gagliano. Kira McAnif produced this episode with help from a system producer, Kaka Wallzick. Jackson Musker is our booking producer, Stephen Colone, mastered it. Our original music was composed by Martin Ostwick, special thanks this time to Dallas Thomas for recording "Mira and Ratesh" also as always to Karina Lesser and thanks to Rob Reiner for the decades of joy, RIP. This show is executive produced by me, along with FHKRL, Daniel Kasmann and Michael Taka, and finally to watch the best in cinema, head to muby.com to start watching. Thanks for listening, happy holidays, and I will have a Laka, a Tommale, a pile of sugar cookies, whatever other holiday stuff that's bad for you. Just pile it on ham, go for it. (upbeat music)