Vaastav opens with a family performing the funeral rites of a person on a beach. When the young son of the deceased asks his grandmother all about the deceased, she begins to narrate the story.
As the film opens, Raghunath Namdev Shivalkar or "Raghu" and his best friend Dedh Footiya (literally meaning "One and a half feet tall" in Hindi) struggle to find work in Mumbai. Raghu lives in a Mumbai Chawl with his retired father , mother and a graduate but unemployed brother. They decide to run a pav bhaji stall. But Raghu and Dedh Footiya accidentally kill a customer who turns out to be the brother of a notorious gangster, Fracture Bandya . Now on the run, the two of them soon kill Fracture Bandya and his men also, when the latter tries to find them and kill them both treacherously by arranging a meeting through Suleiman Bhai, a middle man in the Mumbai underworld. Raghu and Dedh Footiya now end up in the Mumbai underworld.