One of Mumbai's miracles is the lunchbox delivery phenomenon. For 120 years a community of 5000 deliverymen deliver hot meals from the kitchens of housewives to the offices of their husbands. They are illiterate and use a complex coding system of colors and symbols to deliver lunchboxes in the labyrinth that is Mumbai. Harvard University analyzed their delivery system, and concluded that just one in 4 million lunchboxes is ever delivered to the wrong address. This is the story of that one lunchbox.

A wrongly delivered lunchbox connects a housewife - Ila Vaid, to Saajan Fernandes, a lonely man in the dusk of his life. Ila lives in a conservative middle class enclave. And Saajan lives in an old Christian neighborhood that is threatened by the new high rises of Mumbai. Very soon Saajan will retire and bid goodbye to a Mumbai that crushed his dreams, took away his loved ones one by one. Just then Ila comes into his life and they both find a dream to hold on to. They exchange notes in the lunchbox and create a fantasy life. As the lunchbox goes back and forth, this fantasy becomes so elaborate that it threatens to overwhelm their reality.

The characters of The Lunchbox exist on the line between the Mumbai of reality and the Mumbai of fantasy. In the end, they come to a crossroads where they must choose between the two Worlds. The Lunchbox is the story of nostalgia and of hope for the future, and above all, of the small joys of life that need our attention.