Forty years later, love, children and faith keep these marriages together

On May 2, 1980, one of Indian cinema’s iconic screen couples—Dharmendra and Hema Malini, secretly married. When the dream girl and her garam-Dharam settled for “holy” matrimony, they didn’t spare a thought for the bigamy laws of the country. Dharam was a married man, he also had four children from his first marriage to Prakash Kaur. This celebrity couple, whom society and audiences love and respect, became trendsetters. The dream girl and her garam pati actually made eloping fashionable. Six years later in 1986, Tinseltown saw a plethora of secret nuptials.

Jilted in love, Vijayta secretly married Sameer

Cast-aside by her Love Story (1981) co-star, Kumar Gaurav, the jilted Vijayta Pandit, who cried buckets, married director Sameer Malkan almost overnight. The hush-hush affair happened at the ISKCON Temple, Juhu, Mumbai, in accordance to Hindu rites. Both Sameer and Vijayta were consenting adults yet the Pandits didn’t like this secret marriage. Older sisters, Sulakshna and Raashi ran to the nearby beach to drown themselves. Of course, no ‘suicide’ was registered because when the sisters cooled off, they went home, tails between their legs.

Zarina chose a much younger Aditya as her groom