Asha Parekh

did come very close to tying the knot once with a professor from the US. I was visiting him and we were in a cafe at 2 a.m., when he turned to me and nonchalantly said, ‘I have a girlfriend and you’ve come in the way’.

It completely caught me off guard. In a way, that was the final straw for me in this whole wedding business. My friend was travelling with me at the time and when I told her that we were returning to India that very instant, she asked me how I wasn’t gutted that I was cutting ties so unceremoniously with the man I was supposed to be marrying. When I gave her the unedited version, she was livid, but I told her to let it go and, with time, got over it myself. However, his birthday came around a few months later and I expectantly sent him presents, hoping to give the relationship another shot. When I called him, he began rambling in Gujarati and that seemed odd to me because we normally conversed in English. That’s when I learnt that he was in bed with his girlfriend while talking to me. It upset me, and I took it quite badly for a while, but eventually, I got over it. I am a firm believer of the phrase ‘This too shall pass’. And it did.

“Marriage is not all rainbows and butterflies; you have to give in to your partner’s whims every now and then, and that’s a two-way street.”

Excerpt from Asha Parekh’s interview from vervemagazine’s Nov 2019 issue.