Associated Press

Mumbai, February 17:

What do you get a royal as a wedding gift? Mumbai’s dabbawallas, the city’s army of lunch-box delivery men, are scouring shops for wedding presents for Camilla Parker Bowles and Prince Charles.

“What can you buy a king? We’re giving this out of love,” said Raghunath Medge, president of the Dabbawallas’ Association. “We were very happy to hear Prince Charles saab (sir) will be getting married.” Medge, along with several other dabbawallas, met Prince Charles during his Mumbai visit in November 2003. The prince made a lasting impression on the uneducated men who operate a 104-year-old system of moving lunches from people’s homes to their offices. The dabbawallas have already bought green bangles for Parker Bowles and a red pheta, or groom’s turban, for Charles.

But they’re still looking for the right sari for Parker Bowles. They returned a deep-green, maroon and gold one they’d purchased because it was, too, heavy. “We need to choose a lighter sari so it’s not, too, expensive to post,” he said. The dabbawallas transport some 200,000 lunches a day across Mumbai by handcart, bicycle and train, using a complex system of colour codes to pick up and deliver the lunch pails. The men, who use no modern technology, are famous across India for never making mistakes.

When Charles met some of the dabbawallas two years ago, “he asked us a lot of questions about how we move so many boxes so fast and don’t make mistakes when all our 5,000 workers are illiterate,” Medge said. “Not one Indian leader, minister or businessman had ever met us but this man crossed the seven seas and took time to meet us,” said Medge.

He said the dabbawallas decided to send a wedding gift when they heard of the April 8 wedding through the Indian media.