A day before wedding, Om Puri confessed he had an affair with house help; first wife Seema says she didn’t have courage to cancel marriage | Bollywood News

Late actor Om Puri’s first wife, Seema Kapoor, recalled the circumstances in which she became aware of his affairs and infidelities. In an interview, she spoke about Om falling for a journal named Nandita while working on a Hollywood film, and also recalled when he confessed to her about having an affair with a house help, just a day before they were supposed to tie the knot. Their marriage didn’t last all that long, even though they’d known each other for over a decade at that point. She separated from him some months after discovering his affair with Nandita.
In an interview with Siddharth Kannan, Seema said, “We got engaged in 1989, and I don’t know why, but both families rushed us into getting married. Annu bhaiya (Annu Kapoor) was away shooting, and he was very upset that he got to know about his favourite ser’s engagement through another person. In those days, phones weren’t common. Just before the wedding, he told me about his relationship with the house help.”
Also read – Om Puri’s first wife says he cheated on her while she was pregnant, sent her Rs 25,000 via secretary after she lost the ba: ‘Forget consoling me…’
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Asked how she reacted to this news, Seema said that she was shocked. “The invites had been sent out, we were going to have a reception as well. We were in a small town, Jhalawar, where my parents were highly respected individuals. He took me aside to the river and said that he needed to tell me something. I didn’t have the courage to cancel the wedding one day before it was supposed to happen. Women these days are far more courageous; some of them back out even during the rituals,” she said.
Torn between choosing her self-respect over Om, she said that she decided to go through with the wedding, mainly because of societal pressure. “I needed some time to process the information. I didn’t understand why he’d told me then; perhaps if he’d told me sooner, things would’ve been different. This is how a feudal male mind works; they try to gaslight you into thinking that they’ve been honest and given you the agency to decide, but I don’t think he was the sort of man who’d play mind games,” she said.
Seema said that he wasn’t capable of handling delicate situations, and this would end up hurting others. She said that she would’ve probably refused to get married to him had this happened now. In the same interview, she recalled stories about discovering Om Puri’s affair with Nandita, the trauma that it caused, and the legal battle that ensued. She also revealed that she reconnected with him in his final years, after he apologised for how he’d treated her. His relationship with the house help continued well into his life, and became a subject of contention between him and Nandita as well.