The lunch box I remember is a round, three-layered steel tiffin box that I carried every day at primary school in Mumbai. I'm twenty-five now and work as a junior lawyer, so that was quite a long time ago, but I still have a clear picture of it.
It had three round containers stacked on top of each other, held together by a metal clip and a handle at the top. My mother scratched my name on the side with a nail so it wouldn't get mixed up with anyone else's, because nearly every child had an identical one. Mine had a small dent on the lid from when I dropped it on the school stairs.
I used it from about the age of six until I was eleven, when I started buying snacks at the school canteen instead. My mother packed it every morning before she went to work.
The bottom container usually had chapatis or rice, the middle one had a vegetable dish or dal, and the top one had something small, like a piece of fruit or a sweet if I was lucky. On Fridays she sometimes made my favourite potato sandwiches.
I remember it because lunchtime was when we shared food. All of us opened our tiffins on the desks and passed them around, so I tasted dishes from Gujarati, Punjabi, Tamil and Goan families every single day. It was like a little lesson in India's food culture. I also remember feeling embarrassed when other children had colourful plastic boxes with cartoon characters. I begged my mother for one, and she refused, saying steel would last forever. She was right, actually. She still uses it to carry lunch to her office.