Mani Kaul's first feature is an adaptation of a story by the modern Indian novelist, Mohan Rakesh. A woman lives in a small village in Punjab. Daily, she makes lunch for her bus-driver husband, walks it the two miles to his bus route, and waits, sometimes for hours, to deliver it. This, apart from a once-a-week visit and a once-a-month 50-rupee allowance, is her only contact with her faithless, selfish husband, to whom she is nevertheless strangely (traditionally) devoted. One day, a farmer molests the woman's younger sister, and the woman fails to deliver her husband's lunch. In a severe look at the inequalities by which traditional Indian life is maintained, the film renders the consequences of this major interruption in the routine of the bus-driver husband.
Most of the film takes place at the desolate bus stop, set against a barren landscape in the plains of Punjab. Memories, fears and fantasies in the woman's mind are the source of the narrative; past, present and future are merged in this “bitter story of loneliness...(which) proceeds very slowly with a crude reality and is yet so evanescent in its bitterness of unspoken words....” (Avvenuire) Mani Kaul has been compared to Bresson and Tarkovsky for his filmic expression of the struggle between word and emotion, and the portrayal of “the inward turned gaze of human beings.”