Home at last: Adam Bedi and Nisha Harale

In Mumbai’s society pages, they are called an item. He is 22, she is 27. His mother is an American, and father, an Indian. Her mother is a Goan Christian and her father, a Maharashtrian. They met at the launch of a discotheque in Mumbai two years ago, fell in love and are now living together. And they hope to live happily ever after.

Meet Adam and his Eve. That’s Adam Bedi, son of actor Kabir Bedi, and his live-in partner, Nisha Harale. Bedi and Harale choose to speak openly about their relationship at a time when Mumbai is tangled up in its own moral schisms. Mumbai pub-owners are being forced to rename bars named after gods or goddesses. The city’s bars are out of bounds for anyone below 21 years of age. And an upcoming model has had to relinquish a beauty crown she won because she had a live-in relationship with a fellow model.

It’s not been easy for Bedi and Harale either. “It’s been a roller-coaster ride,” says Harale, who comes from a close-knit traditional, middle-class family. “I grew up with my maternal family where phone calls from boyfriends, short skirts, doing make-up etc. were strictly forbidden. It’s been a long way here,” the Miss Mumbai 1996 contest-winner says.

The tall model couple met when Colorado-based Bedi, son of the Sandokan star and American model Susan, came to India for a holiday and Harale, a Gulf-Air air hostess, chucked her Bahrain-based job to explore the modelling world in Mumbai. “I spotted Nisha on the dance floor of a discotheque and couldn’t take my eyes off her. Two days later, on Valentine’s Day, I asked her out and that was it. We’ve been together since then,” says Bedi, chatting at his sister Pooja Bedi’s plush terrace apartment in suburban Versova.

After four months of dating, Bedi and Harale decided to live together — in a one-room rented apartment in Versova. “Nisha used to travel each time with a suitcase and stay in my flat for a few days. So, I said: ‘It is not really a problem if you keep a few things here.’ Living-in is pretty common in the West. But Nisha is an Indian girl, and I had to think how comfortable she would be with the idea,” says Bedi. “We didn’t think about society, but more about our feelings,” Bedi says, sharing his Classic Milds with Harale.

As expected, Harale’s family opposed the idea. “My parents knew that I was living in with my ex-boyfriend in Bahrain and they were cool about it. But, when it came to living in with an American boyfriend in Mumbai, they couldn’t accept it. There was emotional blackmail — mostly about how our situation could affect the future of my younger sister, Nikita,” she says.

It didn’t help that Adam’s father — Kabir — was known for his many relationships. “My dad looks at the whole thing very humorously. When all this was going on, he would smile and say: ‘I don’t think my reputation helps much,’” Bedi, who has inherited his father’s piercing blue eyes, says, laughing out aloud.

Bedi and Harale also have to cope with expectations about their marriage, and find that they often have to hide their live-in status. “People ask us when we’re getting married. We will get married one day for sure. But at the moment we are focused on settling and securing our own lives before making that kind of commitment,” says Bedi.

They were forced to play a married couple during a recent trip to a Lakshadweep diving resort. “My diving instructor told me that it would be better if we posed as a married couple. Otherwise, the local authorities might have had a problem about our sharing a room. I could understand that — they have their own world,” says Bedi. “So, we had to tell a few white lies to ensure that people at the hotel or around us didn’t hassle us.”

But Bedi, who has modelled for brands such as Lawman Jeans, Kinetic GF and Toyota Qualis and acts with Irrfan Khan in Tigmanshu Dhulia’s Charas slotted for a May release, feels that the conservative mindset is gradually changing in India. Harale’s family, for instance, has slowly started to come to terms with the fact that their daughter has a live-in boyfriend.

Her extended family, however, is still to accept their relationship. Everytime the gossip pages mention something about the couple, anxious relatives get in touch with her mother. “They don’t speak to me directly, but they keep calling up my mother,” says Harale.

But, she stresses, there is nothing really dramatically different between a married couple and a live-in pair. “Legal sanction is the only differentiator. Otherwise, we do the same things that a married couple does,” she says.

But Bedi believes that a live-in relationship can be much stronger than a marriage. “In a marriage, you have commitment and the legal sanction. But sometimes you take relationships for granted and assume that your partner would be there, no matter what you did. In a live-in relationship, you don’t end up taking things for granted. You know that each person is free to walk out,” he says.

For the couple, a relationship — live-in or otherwise — is finally all about surprises. Bedi recalls a line from the Tom Hanks-starrer, Forrest Gump, to make his point. “Life is like a box of chocolates,” he says. “You never know what you’re going to get.”