The film starts with a Muslim family watching TV in Sultanpur village, Azad Kashmir, Pakistan and an expectant mother's (Meher Vij) baby kicks when Shahid Afridi leads Pakistan to victory in an India–Pakistan cricket match. A few years later, the baby has grown up to be a young speech-impaired girl, Shahida (Harshaali Malhotra). Her mother takes her to Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya's Dargah in Delhi, India, to pray for her speech to return.
In the middle of the night, right next to the border, the train in which Shahida and her mother were traveling has stopped due to a delay. When everyone is asleep she leaves the train to play with a rabbit she saw hiding in a hole. Unfortunately, the train starts as Shahida is playing with the rabbit. She runs as fast as she can to try and catch it, but, realizing that she cannot, she tearfully watches the train cross through the border and into Pakistan. Lost in India with no way to head back over the border to her home, Shahida boards a freight train, reaching Kurukshetra.
In Kurukshetra, a Brahmin devout Shri Hanuman named Pawan Kumar Chaturvedi, also known as Bajrangi (Salman Khan), is dancing merrily with other worshippers. Shahida spots and follows Bajrangi. He assumes she's also a Brahmin and has separated from her parents. He buys her a Bajrang Bali pendant to protect her from harm. She continues to follow him, even sitting next him on a bus he enters. On the bus ride to Delhi, Bajrangi quizzes the little girl, and calls her Munni to find out which city she's from, but she doesn't respond to any Indian town names. When he is asked by a fellow passenger about how he moved from his hometown of Pratapgarh to Delhi, Bajrangi decides to tell his life story.
Bajrangi tells the story of how he used to be a failure during childhood, and that it took him so many years to pass high school, that his father died of shock when he finally did. He moved to Delhi because it was his father's last wish that he leave him and stay there with a man named Dayanand (Sharat Saxena), to try and find his own job. He tells the story of how he met a woman named Rasika (Kareena Kapoor) in Delhi; they met when a ticket collector on a bus asked Bajrangi to equally split a note of 10 rupees between Rasika and himself. When they got off the bus he followed her and tried to resolve the situation. Exasperated, Rasika asked him to get change from a stall selling water bottles. While he was getting the change, she ran away.
