Why Hansal Mehta got married after living in for 17 years

On the eve of his wedding last month, Hansal Mehta told his two daughters that he was having ‘second thoughts’ about getting married to their mother. Although the celebrated filmmaker says he meant it as a joke, the teenage girls promptly communicated this to their mother, Safeena Husain, who had gone out outfit shopping earlier in the evening for their ‘big day’. When Husain asked her partner why he was acting strange and irritable, Mehta told her he was just kidding. Husain made a face like she often does when Mehta pulls one of his many pranks. But beneath the veneer of humour lay a few grains of truth. “To be honest, I was a little nervous,” Mehta tells this writer on a drive from his hotel to the sets of his next movie. “I was worried. Would the need to get social sanction change the nature of our relationship?” “I mean we were doing perfectly fine without it, right,” Husain adds. “But there were practical reasons to go through with this. My guess is Hansal was just cranky because he couldn’t find the right T-shirt.” medium92522067‘Biting the bullet’On May 25, Mehta, 54, married his partner of 17 years, Safeena Husain, 50, in a quiet ceremony in San Francisco’s Mission District, attended by a few family members and friends. The couple took the decision spontaneously, while vacationing in the US, officiating their marriage at the local magistrate’s office in the presence of their two teenage daughters, Kimaya, 16, and Rihana, 13. It was particularly an emotional moment for Husain. Around 20 years ago, just four blocks from where they got married, she had rented out a DVD of Dil Pe Mat Le Yaar (2000), Mehta’s debut feature, and fell in love with the film. “He has a cameo in it. So I had seen him before I met him,” says Husain. Before this, Mehta was credited for directing the hugely popular food show Khana Khazana in the 1990s. After Dil Pe... opened to a dismal response, Mehta’s career trajectory was marred with a mediocre fare of films like sex comedy Yeh Kya Ho Raha Hai? (2002), Woodstock Villa (2008) and Raakh (2010).It was in 2013 when he found his calling with the release of Shahid, a quiet masterpiece, that introduced Rajkummar Rao to the world. It also won the filmmaker his first National Award. Mehta followed this up with the critically-acclaimed CityLights (2014), Aligarh (2015) and Omerta (2017), finally exploding yet again on the mainstream canvas with Scam 1992 (2020), the series on Harshad Mehta. Throughout the highs and the lows, and there were quite a few, Husain stood firmly by Mehta’s side. (Her father, actor Yusuf Husain, even lent him the money to finish Shahid.) Yusuf Husain’s death last year on October 30 due to Covid forced her to think more clearly about the decision to marry. medium nocaption92522872 “It had been playing on my mind ever since my father died. I made my will. He’s Hindu, I am Muslim. There’s no Uniform Civil Code. So we just decided to take the plunge,” she says. While the couple hadn’t planned on getting married before leaving for the US, Mehta tells TOI+ that it was a conversation that they had been having for many years, the frequency of which increased as their children grew older. “It would often come up when we’d have to navigate our way through the red tape hoops for various documents. So we thought, let’s just get this done with and institutionalise our relationship,” Mehta says. “Unfortunately, this is how our society is structured. We were in a committed relationship anyway, only without the bindings of a conventional certificate. Both Safeena and I are in our early 50s, we don’t want our successors to fight over inheritance. We don’t want to leave behind a legacy of bitterness. So, we bit the bullet. Only because the world wants you to behave a particular way.” medium92522244Rules of modern loveHusain and Mehta first met in January 2005, thanks to writer Daisy Rockwell, who asked her friend, Husain, to organise a Bollywood internship programme for her students at the Institute of South Asia Studies in University of California, Berkeley. Mehta was one of the many who attended the dinner. He knew of Husain as he’d worked with her father on a TV show. The couple began dating a few months later. “He’s a deeply romantic man,” Husain says. "Once I went to see him in Ooty, where he was shooting a movie, and he asked me if he’d like us to drive back to Mumbai so we can spend more time together. I think his spontaneity really drew me towards him. Plus, how often do you find a guy who cooks for you and spectacularly so? In the last 17 years I don’t remember cooking while he’s been around,” laughs Husain. medium nocaption92522853Both have been married before (Mehta has two sons from his previous marriage), and past experiences had made them both sceptical about marriage. “There’s baggage,” Mehta says. “And separations are awful,” Husain adds. “When we first met, we weren’t ready for marriage. You become wary of the institution. We just wanted to be free. Then we had children. It completed us. We spent the subsequent 17 years chasing our dreams. I found my voice as a director, while Safeena worked towards scaling up her non-profit, Educate Girls. We both progressed and grew together...it's been a nurturing, enriching relationship,” Mehta says.Where the two differ“Money,” Husain says promptly. “His mother once said to me that he never thinks about money. And it’s true. He doesn’t stress about money. I’m the opposite, always thinking about investments. His mother also pointed out that she doesn’t worry about us, because she knows that we can talk through situations."“When I’m upset over something, I tell him in two seconds,” she says. “He will tell me, only two years later.” medium92522518Mehta says that hardly anything has changed now that they're ‘officially’ together. “We’ve gone through the motions. The same squabbles, the same insecurity, the same possessiveness, the same monotony, and the same old love. What I like about our relationship is that we've managed to keep it fresh.” Husain shares this notion. “With love and some fresh air.”When it actually came to exchanging vows at the lawyer’s office, Mehta became moist-eyed. “The vows reminded us of why we were together in the first place. I was so overwhelmed. Safeena said some beautiful things. After we were done, we went to a Spanish place in Mission District, and uncorked a bottle of champagne, and life was back to normal.”In Mehta’s Modern Love short, Baai, the filmmaker says that the secret ingredient to food is love. What, according to him, is the secret ingredient to love? “To allow each other to dream freely,” Mehta says promptly. “Your relationship should liberate you. It shouldn’t become a cause for suffocation.” And for Husain? “I don’t think it’s just one thing in isolation. It’s a combination of liking and respecting. Both these factors make love work.”Untitled Carousel 90847017