Tarla: How food serves as the language of love in Huma Qureshi and Sharib Hashmi’s film

If there’s any movie that swears by the idiom, ‘the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach,’ it’s Piyush Gupta’s biopic of Tarla Dalal, starring Huma Qureshi as the popular chef and Sharib Hashmi as her supportive husband Nalin.

(Also Read: Huma Qureshi says being a Muslim, she never felt ‘different’ in India: ‘Questions should be asked’)

First encounter – sweet and spicy

However, it wasn’t love at sight for them. In fact, when Tarla first sees Nalin, he’s sweating profusely. It’s an arranged marriage setup and Tarla doesn’t want to marry. She overhears Nalin’s parents discussing his chronic stomach issues so adds a pinch of laal mirch to her gajar ka halwa. Nalin coughs and sweats, but says ‘I do,’ much to the surprise of Tarla.

Cheating on wife with chicken

Tarla cooks and packs vegetarian food for Nalin every day when he goes to office. But one day, she walks on him cheating on her — with murg musallam. His colleague asks him to taste the chicken dish from his tiffin and Nalin gets drawn to it like a makkhi to kheer.

The scene is terrifically designed to great comedic and dramatic effect as it feels like Nalin is actually cheating on Tarla with another woman. There are successive slow-mo shots of Nalin chewing and slurping on chicken breast and legs, and of Tarla shrieking in horror at the sight of that.

Battle lines drawn – it’s kitchen vs bedroom

The war between the vegetarian wife and the ‘occasionally’ non-vegetarian husband is declared with another dose of laal mirch in gajar ka halwa. Tarla then bans Nalin from the kitchen. She owns the space not just in her home turf of the kitchen but also in the otherwise male-dominated bedroom. When they’re sleeping, Nalin tries to sweet-talk her by saying, “Aaj lauki bahut achhi thi” (Talk veggie to me?). But Tarla is too scarred to give in to that foreplay, so she turns around and continues to sleep.

When love goes outside the kitchen window

The rest of the story plays out like that of Suresh Triveni’s 2017 film Tumhari Sulu, starring Vidya Balan as a homemaker-turned-late night RJ and Manav Kaul as her supportive husband. Food is to Tarla what sex talk was to Tumhari Sulu.

Like Vidya’s Sulu, Tarla is also shamed for taking her passion outside home. While Sulu is a late-night RJ in 2010s, Tarla is merely a homemaker who wants to hold cooking classes in her housing society. The management committee members of the society protest against her classes, even while they gorge on sugar-free besan laddoos made by her.

The otherwise supportive husband also caves in to the wife’s professional rise in both the films. For both Manav Kaul and Sharib Hashmi’s characters, the frustration of their own failures at work vis a vis their wives’ progress in unconventional careers is compounded by personal jealousy. Tarla’s food and Sulu’s sweet sex-talk was once reserved for their husbands, but the collective consumption of their wives’ skills irks them to no end.

Both men seek their in-laws’ help who further shame their wives for choosing their profession over their homemaking duties. The men claim ownership as fathers only to put the mother down. Both Tarla and Sulu have to endure embarrassing conversations at work where they tell their women bosses that they can’t continue their jobs any further.

Both men come around sooner or later, but the parallel journies of Tarla and Sulu tell us how working women don’t have it easy. Their exceptional skills are admired only as long as they’re in service of the husband. At the end of the day, both women risk ending up exactly where they started – caged inside the immaculately round chapatis they’re subjected to make all their lives.