In the heart of middle-class India, Neel Pandey, just out of college, dreams day and night of his first love - America - and also of an escape from his father's grandiose desire to land an upper caste daughter-in-law. Unable to go to the United States, he takes the second best - a job at a call center where he assumes an American identity.

Meanwhile, in faraway New York, Angela Cruz has escaped her racist father and life in Jackson, Mississippi, and is a journalist chasing her big story - of a school band of immigrant kids in a New York suburb who have been selected to perform at a musical extravaganza but don't have the money to fly there. Angela buys a computer, it malfunctions, and she calls the call center to scream at them.

She runs into Neel, and, many many conversations later, they tumble into a faraway romance. Once upon a Time zone is a funny light-hearted look at two people, into different continents who are both trying to escape similar worlds of prejudice, and who realize somewhere along the way that mix-ups and cover-ups, nationalities and distances, notwithstanding, they are deeply in love.