AGELESS: (From top) Padma Lakshmi and Salman Rushdie; V.S. Naipaul and Nadira; a scene from Cheeni Kum

AMITABH BACHCHAN WITH a ponytail may not quite be your idea of a dreamboat. But every time the 64-year-old actor appeared on screen in Cheeni Kum, women viewers in a Delhi multiplex clapped and whistled lustily. Bad hair or not, the idea of an older man marrying a much younger woman clearly had its share of takers.

But director R. Balki, by his own admission, had a “normal” marriage. By normal he means his wife is younger than he is — but within “permissible” limits. Not like his recently released maiden film on a romance between a 64-year-old man (Bachchan) and a 34-year-old woman (Tabu) that culminates in marriage. The film came a few months after Ram Gopal Verma’s Nishabd, a tale of unrequited love that an old man nurtures for a teenager.

“It’s possible but hardly probable. In that sense, it’s more of wishful thinking,” Balki admits candidly. “I do believe in it and I feel it should happen. But I didn’t want to send out any message through my film.” So if the message that life begins at 60 does get conveyed, Balki would have you believe it is merely incidental.

Incidental, perhaps, but in no way improbable. For May-December relationships — between older men and much younger women — are clearly not just a figment of a director’s imagination: reel life mirrors reality.

Psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar and his German anthropologist wife, Katharina, could well have been the inspiration for the two characters in Cheeni Kum. Nine years ago, when Katharina married Kakar, she was 31, and he 60.

There are others like them who are in the league of extraordinary couples leading blissful married lives, the age difference notwithstanding. Salman Rushdie and Padma Lakshmi have an age gap of 23 years. V.S. Naipaul and his better half, Nadira, have two decades between them. Sitar player Ravi Shankar and Sukanya are separated by 30 years. Artist Jatin Das’s second wife, documentary filmmaker Bidisha, is young enough to be his daughter. Economist Meghnad Desai and his wife Kishwar Ahluwalia have an age difference of 17 years.

Cynics hold that older men have lust on their mind, and younger women have lucre on theirs in such relationships. But partners in such marriages believe that these are prejudices that need to be shattered. They argue that older men look for sensitivity rather than sensuality in a younger woman, who also works as a rejuvenating force. And younger women, in turn, lay a huge premium on security, experience, charisma and humour. But as consultant psychiatrist J.R. Ram of Apollo Gleaneagles, Calcutta, puts it, “It takes real commitment, emotional flexibility, compromise and empathy on both sides for an age gap relationship to work.”

AND THAT WOULD EXPLAIN why these unconventional yet happy marriages haven’t quite caught on as a raging trend. Prospective brides and grooms still believe in the concept of keeping a gap of five years between them. “We haven’t as yet come across a prospective bride or groom who has mentioned the criterion ‘age no bar’,” notes Gunjan Sinha of Shaadi.com, an online marriage service.

Yet, such a relationship usually has a fair share of advantages. “Ours is a mature relationship,” says Katharina. “We don’t have fights which couples normally do. That’s perhaps because of the age factor. We both have undergone certain experiences and can handle situations better.”

Economist Desai, who met Kishwar Ahluwalia when she was editing his book, Nehru’s Hero Dilip Kumar in the Life of India, had, perhaps, put it aptly when he had said, “What it is to be 63 and to be in love is that you feel like a 23-year-old but it is a very much happier 23-year-old. All the anxieties you have when you are 23 are not there.”

Kakar met his wife in Germany, where he was invited for a conference. “We enjoyed talking to each other and very quickly were in love,” recalls Katharina, who has co-authored The Indians: Portrait of a People with her husband.

For some such couples, it has been more of a Mills and Boon style romance. In an interview during his courtship days with Padma Lakshmi, Rushdie had said that the comely photographs of his wife in the magazine, Panorama, had made him think, “If I ever meet this girl, my goose is cooked.” And in 2004, when his goose was finally cooked — perhaps on the lines of a recipe from Padma Lakshmi’s cookbook — those who knew them declared, theirs was a “marriage of sense and sensibility”.

NADIRA TOO, WAS SMITTEN by Naipaul at first sight. As a special correspondent for Pakistan’s newspaper The Nation, she first met him — “this man, very ravaged, tired, bent over a plate of salad” — at the American Consulate. He was tired, and so was she, Nadira later said in an interview. “I saw him and I was just filled with a kind of reverence... And, I looked at him, and I was just full of love, and pity, and for myself probably, because I was suffering too. And I said to him, ‘Can I kiss you?’ I didn’t even wait. I kissed him on his cheek. He looked at me and he said, ‘I think you should sit down…!’”

But not everyone is as forthcoming when it comes to talking about their life partners or the ifs and buts of such a marriage. Jatin Das, for one, thinks it’s too “flippant” an issue.

Sudhir Kakar, however, has a humorous way of putting it. “I claim the protection of the US Fifth amendment,” he says, referring to the right to avoid testifying against oneself. But on probing further, he deems it fit to add, “Age is incidental. Maturity has nothing to do with age. Essentially, it’s compatibility that matters.”

Not all such marriages are hunky-dory. Two months ago, a story in The New York Observer said that the Rushdies’ friend, fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, was overheard exclaiming, “I can’t believe she’s leaving him.” Rushdie was earlier quoted as saying in The Daily Telegraph that his young wife believed many of the films and books he liked were “ancient history”, and that his hero, Bob Dylan, couldn’t sing. “It is terrible. She is wrong, of course. I mean, she likes hip hop. We just listen to our music in different rooms.”

But then, as Balki puts it, this could happen in any other “normal” marriage too. What sustains a marriage is accepting partners the way they are. Katharina, for one, is not willing to change anything at all in her marriage. “I am very happy with my husband.” Just as happy as Tabu seemed — the firmness in Katharina’s tone seems to imply — when she had Amitabh Bachchan by her side. Ponytail notwithstanding.