Seema Kapoor, the first wife of the late actor Om Puri, recently reflected on how she came to know about his affairs and infidelities. In a candid interview, she shared that Om developed feelings for a journalist named Nandita while he was involved in a Hollywood project. She also recalled a moment just a day before their wedding when Om admitted to having had an affair with a domestic worker. Although the two had known each other for more than ten years before getting married, their relationship was short-lived. Seema chose to part ways with him a few months later after learning about his involvement 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 sister’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.”
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.
Despite all of that, she did not call off 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 shared that Om Puri often struggled to navigate sensitive situations, which unintentionally led to others getting hurt. Reflecting on the past, she admitted that if faced with the same circumstances today, she likely wouldn’t have agreed to marry him. In the same conversation, she opened up about the emotional toll of discovering his relationship with Nandita, the pain it caused her, and the legal conflict that followed. She also mentioned that in his later years, they managed to reconnect after Om expressed remorse for his past behavior.
