Nurse Prabha receives an unexpected gift from her estranged husband that throws her life into disarray. Her younger roommate, Anu, tries in vain to find a spot in the city to be intimate with her boyfriend. One day the two nurses go on a road trip to a beachtown where the mystical forest becomes a space for their dreams to manifest.

Kaki is a 60-year-old widow who lives with her Nepali maid, Malti. The film takes place on one afternoon in their house where a flower blossoms in the balcony. Malti meets a boy (a sailor) from her hometown unexpectedly.

The summer has its own songs. Whispering softly, they make their way to us from the depths of the jungle. The high treetops sway and rustle. Once a tiger prowled the village. The father doesn’t tell his son about this, as he holds him tight. In calm takes that concede the jungle its beauty, stature and deep serenity, the images move between the immediate and the totality, between the all-too-human and the awareness of the gods who will protect the village. The arrangement of the images is akin to a hanging of paintings. The stories that the villagers tell the director follow a similar order in their sequencing. One leads to the next by association, thus opening up a village cosmos in which the old coexists with the new. Suddenly they appear, the forest creatures – only to vanish the next moment. A strange smoke exudes from the ground, like a dream from a bygone era. ‘People only sing, when they are in love with someone,’ the woman whispers – the day is done. For a brief moment the film is bathed once again in colour.

The Last Mango Before the Monsoon has no central character, narrative arc or clear progression. Its scenes are non-linear and flow freely into one another. Rather than being a weakness, this is precisely the film’s strength. The film is perhaps the first clear example in Kapadia’s filmography of how sound can lead the process of image-making, with densely layered aural textures and tones melding together to enhance the vibrancy of environments they are placed overtop of.

L, a student in India witness to the government's violent response to university protests, writes letters to her estranged lover while he is away.