Chennai Express

Rahul Mithaiwala (Shahrukh Khan) is a forty-year old bachelor who lives in Mumbai. His parents died in a car accident when he was eight years old and was brought up by grandparents. His grandfather has a sweet-selling chain store – Y.Y. Mithaiwala. Before his birth centenary celebration, two of Rahul's friends suggest a vacation in Goa which he accepts. On the eve of the celebration, his grandfather dies whilst watching a cricket match. His grandmother tells him that his grandfather desired to have his ashes divided into two parts – to be immersed in the Ganges River and Rameswaram respectively. She requests Rahul to go to Rameswaram and immerse them. Rahul reluctantly accepts her request but was also eager to attend the Goa trip. He and his friends thus make plans to dump the ashes at Goa. But, they were forced to change the plan when Rahul's grandmother wanted to personally see him off. This forces him to travel by train; he booked a single ticket on the Chennai Express. He plans to meet his friends at the Kalyan Junction station from where they would travel to Goa by car. Rahul forgets to take his grandfather's ashes on reaching the station and when he comes back to get it, when the train was leaving the platform, he sees a girl (apparently South Indian) running to catch the train. He helps her board the moving train. Then he notices four men with her, helps them all to get in and himself misses the platform to get off. He tries to flirt with the girl assuming she does not know his language. To his surprise, she starts communicating by singing parodies of Hindi film music, so that the others don't understand. Rahul, on her demand, lends his mobile phone so that she can contact her friends but the men with her throw it away from the moving train. He gets annoyed by this, however keeps quiet seeing that they carry weapons and guns along. He informs the ticket examiner about them but they push the man into a lake below the railway bridge. Extremely panicked, Rahul learns that those men were actually kidnapping her and that she is Meenalochni Azhagusundaram (Deepika Padukone) a.k.a. Meenamma. She was trying to flee from a forced marriage to Tangaballi (Nikitin Dheer). Her father Durgeshwara Azhagusundaram (Sathyaraj), is a powerful headman of the Komban Kaum (an anagram of Kumbakonam) in Tamil Nadu. He wants her to marry Tangaballi so that he would assume control of the neighboring village as well.