Late actor Om Puri’s first wife Seema Kapoor (sister of actor Annu Kapoor) opened up about her troubled marriage, Om Puri’s infidelity in an interview with Siddharth Kannan. Seema Kapoor revealed the film veteran cheated on her when she was pregnant. After she lost the child, Om Puri sent her Rs 25000 via secretary which she refused to accept. Despite the cracks in the marriage, Seema didn’t want to divorce Om Puri but things went beyond her control.
During the interview, Seema Kapoor shared Om Puri met Nandita Puri (a journalist) while working on City of Joy. Many of her close friends knew about their affair but they kept her in the dark.
“Everything was going fine after our marriage, but that movie turned my life upside down… My good friend Renu Saluja, Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s first wife, knew about the affair. But she and Sudhir Mishra and everyone else chalked it down to a phase. They felt that he’d get back to normal after the film. I found out about the affair much later, when I was in Delhi. He called me up and told me that he was seeing someone else, and my friends said that he was just seeking attention,” reminsced Seema Kapoor.
Things were not the way they were portrayed in front of her and Seema Kapoor could sense that from Om Puri’s voice. He was serious about wanting a divorce while Seema wanted to save the marriage as she was pregnant back then.
“I returned to Mumbai, and everything felt normal. He left the city for a shoot soon afterwards, and while sifting through his stuff, I discovered love letters. I was shattered. I never wanted to divorce him, despite the affair. I wanted to mend things, because I was pregnant. He knew I was pregnant, but this was a source of insecurity for Nandita. She’d call him up in front of me,” she said.
Seema Kapoor couldn’t bear the emotional torture and decided to leave his house. She was three-month pregnant then: “But things became overwhelming; Puri sahab would drink too much, and Nandita would make a scene. One night, I decided to leave. I was three months pregnant.”
Things reached at a state when Annu Kapoor wanted to drag Om Puri to court. Seema Kapoor got Rs 6 lakh as alimony but refused the Rs 25,000 the actor sent after their child died.
“Forget consoling me. He sent Rs 25,000 via his secretary. I turned it down, and his secretary told me, ‘This ego is what is destroying you’. But what he thought was ego was just self-respect,” recalled Seema Kapoor.
In 1993, Om Puri married journalist Nandita Puri and they had a son named Ishaan. Om Puri died in 2017. During his final years, he called up Seema Kapoor and apologised.
