The Tarla Dalal biography, directed by Piyush Gupta, and starring Huma Qureshi as the well-known chef and Sharib Hashmi as her devoted husband Nalin, is one of the films that most fervently adheres to the proverb “the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.”
first meeting: sweet and sour
But for them, it wasn’t love at first sight. In fact, Nalin is visibly perspiring when Tarla first notices him. Tarla does not want to be married and it is an arranged marriage. She overhears Nalin’s parents discussing his ongoing digestive problems, so she gives her gajar ka halwa a dash of laal mirch. Tarla is shocked when Nalin responds, “I do,” while coughing and perspiring.
cheating with chicken on the wife
For Nalin, Tarla prepares and packs vegetarian meals every day before he leaves for work. She discovers him cheating on her with murg musallam, though, one day. Nalin is pulled to the chicken dish as a makkhi is to kheer when his colleague invites him to sample it from his lunchbox.
The way the situation is set up makes it seem as if Nalin is genuinely having an extramarital affair with Tarla, which has both humorous and serious overtones. Tarla screams in fear as she watches Nalin chew and suck on chicken legs and breasts in a series of slow-motion images.
Kitchen and bedroom are the two fronts in this battle.
Another dosage of laal mirch in gajar ka halwa serves as the declaration of war between the vegetarian wife and the “occasionally” non-vegetarian husband. Then Tarla forbids Nalin from using the kitchen. She controls the area not just in the kitchen, which is her preferred setting, but also in the typically male-dominated bedroom. Nalin asks her to “Talk veggie to me?” as they are sleeping in an attempt to win her over. Tarla, however, is too traumatised to succumb to such foreplay; as a result, she turns around and goes back to sleep.
When romance is seen via the kitchen window
The remaining events of the plot are similar to those in Suresh Triveni’s 2017 movie Tumhari Sulu, which starred Vidya Balan as a housewife who later became a late-night RJ and Manav Kaul as her devoted husband. What sexual conversation was to Tumhari Sulu, food is to Tarla.
Tarla is chastised for following her interest outside the house, same like Vidya’s Sulu. While Tarla is just a housewife who wants to teach culinary lessons in her housing society, Sulu is a late-night RJ in the 2010s. While gorging on her homemade sugar-free besan laddoos, the society’s management committee members criticise her courses.
In both movies, the husband, who would normally be supportive, gives in to the wife’s career advancement. Personal envy adds to the anger of Manav Kaul and Sharib Hashmi’s characters’ failures at work in comparison to their spouses’ advancement in unorthodox occupations. The fact that their spouses are now enjoying Tarla’s cuisine and Sulu’s seductive conversation is very upsetting to them.
Both men turn to their in-laws for assistance, who further humiliate their spouses for prioritising their careers above their household responsibilities. The guys disparage the mother while claiming to be the dads. Both Tarla and Sulu must suffer awkward office interactions in which they inform their female superiors that they must resign from their positions.
Sooner or eventually, both guys come around, but Tarla and Sulu’s parallel journeys show us how difficult life can be for working women. Their extraordinary abilities are only acknowledged while they are working for the spouse. At the end of the day, both ladies run the danger of finding themselves back where they began, cooped up within the perfectly spherical chapatis they have spent their whole lives making.