The lovely Nimrat Kaur plays Ila, a bored housewife who suspects her husband is having an affair. She cooks lunch for him and it is picked up and delivered via a system that apparently is routine in Mumbai, with messengers collecting individual containers of food, adding them to the delivery load and dropping them off at different offices to the intended personnel, followed by subsequent return of the containers.

One day Ila’s lunchbox is delivered to the wrong person, Saajan Fernandes, played by the fine actor Irrfan Khan, an accountant nearing retirement from the firm where he has labored for 35 years. He is a widower and rather dour and depressed, assigned to break in as his replacement young Shaikh, played with boundless enthusiasm by Nawazuddin Siddiqui. The mistaken delivery continues, with a series of back and forth increasingly revealing notes building up curiosity and an emotional tie. The situation holds much more audience appeal than internet correspondence might offer. Illa finally takes the lead and suggests a meeting in a café.

Before this happens we also get a glimpse at the life of the intended replacement, an atmospheric sense of Mumbai, office pressures, Saajan’s consideration of changing his mind about retiring and an incident that is upsets him. Someone offers him a seat on a train, and that unnerves him because it makes him feel old.

When Ila shows up for a rendezvous we see her sitting there alone, waiting in vain for Saajan to show up. We later learn that he was there, but feeling too old for this beautiful younger woman, he did not approach.

This sets off a set of consequences. The acting is excellent, with Kaur communicating the inner longing for love and a happier life, and Khan expressing his character’s similar yearnings from the standpoint of what is missing in his life. To the filmmaker’s credit there is no pat resolution, but the situation is left open-ended enough for us to speculate on what may yet happen.

I’m not sure I buy the notion that a man in Saajan’s situation, hardly an old man, would worry so much about a beautiful woman with whom he had been having such a warm correspondence being too young for him. The world is awash with older men married to younger women in a variety of societies.