Not every love story ends in marriage and Neena Gupta proves you don’t need one to raise a happy family. Decades before she became a household name in Bollywood, Neena found herself at a crossroads.
She was in a relationship with West Indies cricket star Vivian Richards, who was already married and had a family of his own. When she discovered she was pregnant, the situation became complicated and for a while, she genuinely didn’t know what to do. Some people around her even suggested her to think about ending the pregnancy.
That’s when her close friend Satish Kaushik made a surprising offer. He proposed marrying her himself, so she could tell the world the baby was his and avoid the judgment that came with being an unmarried mother. It was a generous gesture but Neena Gupta said no. She didn’t want to hide behind a false story just to satisfy social expectations.
Instead, she made up her mind to have the baby. She called Vivian to tell him she was pregnant and he stood by her choice. In her autobiography, Sach Kahun Toh, Neena Gupta opened up about that time, describing how happy and hopeful she felt about becoming a mother, even knowing she’d have to face a society that wasn’t always kind to unmarried women in her position.
She chose to raise her daughter Masaba entirely on her own terms. Neena Gupta later admitted that her feelings for Vivian didn’t fade quickly, she stayed emotionally attached to him for years, and she and Masaba would spend time with him whenever the opportunity came up.
Masaba was born in November 1989. For years after, Neena Gupta poured herself into building a life and a home for her daughter, before eventually marrying chartered accountant Vivek Mehra in 2008.
The story came full circle when Masaba found her own happy ending. On January 27, 2023, she married actor and lawyer Satyadeep Misra in a small, intimate court wedding. The two had first crossed paths while filming Masaba Masaba together and interestingly, this marriage was a second one for both of them.
