Is there trouble in the Sridevi-Boney paradise? Twenty years is long enough for people to forget that at the end of 1996, Boney and Mona Kapoor were officially still a couple and Sridevi was the other woman.

It had made for much scandal especially when the other woman was then reported to be pregnant and Mona as the distraught wife couldn't do much about it. But her producer-mother, the redoubtable Sattee Shourie, who was known to be a battle-axe, wouldn't sniffle away her sorrows like her daughter did. When she heard that her errant son-in-law and his current woman were having coffee at a Juhu five-star hotel on New Year's Eve, she stormed in there and had a public showdown with the lovers. There were reports then that she'd tried to hit the pregnant actress in her stomach. Sridevi delivered Jahnvi, her first daughter, a few months later.

Sattee tried her best to fight the injustice to her daughter and even filed a case against Boney for bigamy. But since only the wife is considered the aggrieved party and Mona wouldn't bring action against her children's father or become a public spectacle, it wasn't entertained by the courts.

Soon, public memory being fickle and short, Sridevi and Boney became a couple and Mona became the third angle.

Twenty years is long enough for the scenario to change beyond recognition. Mona has been dead for four years and Sridevi is legally wed to her husband Boney. And by the time Sattee Shourie died early this month after a long illness, the tables had completely turned.

But one has to say that even in these changed circumstances, this branch of Kapoors behaved with complete grace. The entire clan came to pay their last respects to Sattee and to stand by young Arjun Kapoor and his sister Anshula who were emotionally attached to their maternal grandmother. Boney and Anil were at the cremation ground with their nephew Mohit Marwah and all their close colleagues who had remained Mona's friends till the end (particularly Satish Kaushik, Baba and Tanvi Azmi, Indra Kumar and Bijon Dasgupta). At the prayer meeting two days later, Anil's wife Sunita and daughter Sonam Kapoor came and heard Anup Jalota's farewell bhajans to Sattee. Even Boney's sister Rina Marwah, who lives in Delhi, came to the prayer meeting at Iskcon. Of course, Boney was there too, sitting quietly on the side, while Arjun's friends like Malaika Arora and Athiya Shetty came to pay their condolences to him.

For Arjun, it was emotionally draining. He'd just left his grandmother's bedside and flown to Delhi for the shooting of Half Girlfriend when he was summoned back for her cremation. He went back to his shoot immediately after that but returned for the prayer meeting, following which he was soon headed for the airport again.

One would think that after 20 years and the passing of Mona and Sattee, the unchallenged situation today would have healed everybody around. But one hears that Sridevi didn't take kindly to the Kapoor turnout, especially her husband's presence at the funeral and prayer meeting of someone who'd publicly humiliated her. And Boney, who once had to duck Sattee's wrath, now had to face Sridevi's tandav . At one time, he was asked how he could do this to his wife (Mona), the mother of his two kids (Arjun, Anshula). Now he's pulled up and questioned how he could do this to his wife (Sridevi), the mother of his two daughters (Jahnvi, Khushi), and go mourn the passing of his estranged mother-in-law. What goes around, comes around?

Messy marriages remind me of the recently deceased actor Razzak Khan (the long-nosed comic actor of films like Badshah and Hello Brother) who got his break with Boney Kapoor's Roop Ki Rani Choron Ka Raja . He had three daughters from his first wife and a son from his second. But the night he died, he was not with any of them. He was out with friends and driving alone when he had a heart attack. Realising that something drastic was happening to him, Razzak drove himself to Holy Family Hospital, where he got himself admitted and died almost on arrival.

One hears that with both wives claiming his dead body, he finally passed his last night in neither of his two homes but in the morgue from where he was taken directly to the burial ground. To top it, his only son was all set to say his wedding vows in Croatia when he heard of his father's death. So the bridegroom flew into Mumbai, buried his dad, and flew back to his waiting bride.

Life was tragi-comic till the end. RIP Razzak.

Bharathi S. Pradhan is a senior journalist and author