What He Left Behind

Haseena Nahi Maani

Sunjay Kapur and Karisma Kapoor knew each other long before the world started keeping score. Childhood friends, really. Families close. Mothers close. The kind of closeness that seeps into everything, like it's inherited. Karisma's mother even shot one of her films, Haseena Maan Jaayegi, at the Kapur family home. Kids running through the corridors, sharing holidays, growing up like characters in a story that nobody had written yet. 

Did they ever talk about life beyond "friends"? Did their mothers plant the idea of marriage? We don't know. But we know they didn't take it there. Not then. Life must've happened. They drifted apart. Sunjay married Nandita Mahtani in 1996, Delhi's fashion designer. That marriage ended quietly in 2000, a prelude to the storm.

Sunjay's marriage ended quietly in 2000. A prelude.

Meanwhile, Karisma's own personal life was already making headlines: She got engaged with Abhishek in October 2002, during Amitabh Bachchan's 60th birthday bash. Three months later, it was over. The end.

So when the year 2003 opened, both single were ready to mingle. Karishma was at the peak of her Bollywood career, adored, photographed, celebrated. Sunjay was the industrial heir with charm and ambition. The media loved it: old corporate royalty marrying film royalty.

The wedding was a spectacle—opulent, theatrical, and swarming with paparazzi. Karisma shimmered in pink and gold, Sunjay looked every bit the dapper groom, and the who's who of Bollywood turned up in designer finery. But amid the glitter, one moment stood out: Randhir Kapoor, Karisma's father, caught mid-gesture, his face twisted in what looked suspiciously like a scolding. Was he reacting to a pushy photographer? Chiding a relative for breaking tradition? Or was it something more prophetic, an instinctive flare of disapproval at the man his daughter was marrying?

Of course we're tempted to put words into that frozen mouth, words that would, years later, come tumbling out in a 2016 interview, as Priya and Karisma's children locked horns over Sunjay's contested will: 'Sunjay is a third-class man. I never wanted Karisma marrying him. He has debauchery in his system and never cared for his wife. The entire Delhi knows how he is."

"The sparkle didn't last. Sunjay's world was built on discipline and legacy. Karisma's on fame and independence. Then the allegations surfaced. Emotional abuse. Physical abuse. In early 2016, Karisma filed a domestic violence case—Case No. 41/16—in the Metropolitan Magistrate Court in Bandra, Mumbai, accusing Sunjay and his mother of cruelty. She claimed he pressured her to sleep with his friends during their honeymoon, a claim he denied.

There were other moments, quieter but no less brutal. During her pregnancy, Karisma once wore a dress Sunjay apparently didn't approve of. Instead of confronting her directly, he allegedly asked her mother to slap her. The humiliation wasn't loud, it was orchestrated. And it stayed with her."

Finally, on April 8, 2016, the Supreme Court recorded a mutual consent settlement between Karisma and Sunjay. Two months later, on June 13, the Family Court in Bandra granted the divorce. Karisma was awarded full custody of their children—Samaira and Kiaan—while Sunjay was given visitation rights: twice a month, fifteen days in summer, and a split of winter and school holidays.

She also agreed to withdraw the domestic violence case, and the FIR was quashed. It was a clean legal line drawn through a messy emotional history. On paper, it was closure. In reality, it was just another chapter, one where silence replaced shouting, and custody schedules replaced confrontation.

It looked like the story had ended.