Her endearing laughter. His warm, bear hugs. Pinky and Shaun Kenworthy, one of the coolest couples in Calcutta. They met each other more than two decades back when Shaun made Calcutta his home. “Best mates”, they have held onto one another in the most trying times of their lives. And, come out of it, only stronger, forging a bond of a lifetime. Touchwood, we say! In a candid chat with t2, the lovely couple walk down memory lane, revisiting their romance of a friendship that lies at the very foundation of their relationship.

How did you meet and get married?

Pinky: We knew of each other. How I met him was I saw him in Tantra. We exchanged ‘hi’. Just by the by, we exchanged numbers.
Shaun: She used to come to The Park every day...
Pinky: For a shoot or show. For a break, we’d go to the coffee shop. Then Shaun would come out from his office (when Shaun used to work at The Park) and we’d sit and chat in the afternoon. I would tell him what happened at Tantra. I used to enter Tantra around 12.30am-1am and he would be leaving at that time. My friends and I used to party from Monday to Monday (laughs). I used to order black coffee at the bar so that I could dance for hours (laughs).
Shaun: I would go to Tantra on a Wednesday or a Friday or Saturday, for an hour after work. Or, pop in at Someplace Else. After a few days, she and I started chatting on the phone.
Pinky: I had been separated and moved out from my ex-husband, more than a year had passed and divorce was applied soon after. I may have come out of a marriage, but I wanted to get married again. There were all these proposals from friends whom I had known for years! (Laughs out loud) This mister out of nowhere said, ‘How about you and me, we go to Aquatica?!’ I had never dated before. I said I wasn’t free. Then another time, he asked me for something else. I kept making excuses. He kept asking gently and I kept declining, gently. Dating was a new game which I didn’t want to play because I didn’t know what it entailed. Then one day he said he’d like to cook for me and invited me home.

Shaun: I said let me cook you lunch. We were quite good friends by then. I used to stay on Lord Sinha Road back then.

Pinky: He said he’d go shopping and I said I’d accompany him because I had never done grocery shopping in my life before that. We went to C3 on Elgin Road. Once we reached his flat, he showed me around, a very cool space, filled with DIY furniture, his paintings, and we got chatting. Eventually he cooked. It was a piece of fish with a mountain of vegetables on top. We chatted for a bit more and then he dropped me home. There was another time when my purse got stolen and I didn’t have the money to come back home. He said: ‘I can give you some money’. And nobody dared to say that to me! I took the money reluctantly, very embarrassingly. About ₹100. After my shoots, I’d go to his flat and we would chat a lot. The friendship grew organically.
Shaun: It grew pretty quickly. I introduced her to the city. She had no clue!
Pinky: He took me on a boat ride across the river. I was 29! (Laughs) I loved it! He bought me some water lilies, which I thought was cute.
Shaun: And we took a ferry up to Kumartuli, all very cute and innocent really.
Pinky: I was on good terms with my ex-husband too and it didn’t end in bitterness at all. Finally, the divorce papers came through. I had known Shaun for a couple of months then. Very casually, in a yellow taxi, he said: ‘Let’s get married!’ Yellow taxi is very much a part of our story, it seems! (Laughs) I said, ‘Yeah’. We were great friends, very fond of each other. What is romance and love? It’s that only. Where you enjoy each other’s company and you can laugh together. There was a bond which felt nice and comfortable to me. It felt safe.

Shaun: We were best friends.
Pinky: From the day I went to his house for lunch, we were stuck to each other. I completely went off-grid. No nightclubs. Shaun and me, nobody ever imagined. When we decided to get married, we said we’d go to a registrar and applied for the registry. I had introduced him to mom and dad earlier on and he had got on well with them. He had come home for a drink and dinner. I cooked for him in the microwave. I made paneer and he said he hated paneer. Even when we applied for registry, we told no one.
Shaun: In fact, from the day we started dating, we had gone off-grid. Literally nobody knew.
Pinky: A couple of weeks before we got married, I told my parents that we are sort of seeing each other. The evening the registrar called saying that we had to get married in three weeks, we decided to get married the next day. We needed three witnesses. We decided it’d be my mum and dad and Paul Walsh. Shaun called my dad in the evening and asked, ‘What are you doing tomorrow?’ It was Panchami that day.
Shaun: I asked him: ‘What are you doing tomorrow? Are you free to sign some papers?’ He said: ‘What for?’ I said: ‘I am marrying your daughter’. He said okay, it was as simple as that.
Pinky: My mother called me back immediately, saying there was no auspicious time or date anywhere around that time of the year…. And what about jewellery, a sari?! That was her biggest concern, but she also knew that there is no stopping me. She somehow found an auspicious hour. The next day we were up early, looking for wedding bands till afternoon. Then we had Chinese lunch, I went back home (to get dressed). It felt like I was going to do a fashion show. I put on a turquoise blue chiffon Benarasi with a parrot-green border and some make-up. Shaun wore a white chikan kurta. We got married on Sashthi. Paul Walsh took our pictures.
Shaun: We got married in Bhowanipore by a Raja Bannerjee, up a flight of rickety stairs in his very Bengali-style cluttered legal office.
Pinky: We went to Kewpie’s for dinner and Rakhi (Purnima Dasgupta of Kewpie’s) signed a cookbook which I still use. Post-dinner, I took off all my jewellery, gave it to mom and the pair of us went off pandal-hopping till the wee hours! (Laughs)
Shaun: Looking back and after seeing all the drama people make around weddings, by far the coolest way to get married!
Pinky: In the morning, I realised I had to tell my friends. I messaged one and all hell broke loose! (Laughs)
Shaun: I hadn’t told my family either. I called up saying: just by the by that ‘I got married yesterday’, with a childlike smirk.

Both of you went through a tough phase early on in the marriage...

Pinky: We got pregnant within two-three months. I was clear that I want to get married so that I can have kids. Maxx was born. Very pretty boy with grey eyes. When he was two months old, he was suddenly not feeding. I had no experience with babies. We took him for a check-up late at night and we were told there’s nothing to worry about. In the morning we took him to Woodlands. It didn’t seem major. In the evening, we were told he had passed away. He’d had a massive brain haemorrhage. I was zapped. We stayed the night at The Park and gave Paul the responsibility for arranging a grave and everything else. I wasn’t even crying. It was so surreal. It was the same month as our anniversary. I decided that I wanted to have another child. In psychology, there is a term called ‘replacement child’. When you lose a child, you want another child. I conceived within two months. So, I had two Cesareans in one year. The gynaecologist said, ‘Are you crazy?’ I sailed through the pregnancy. Then Maya was born in a private nursing home. I wanted it to be a private nursing home where the baby was next to me. A paranoia had started to set in. While stitching me up, she said for three years, you cannot think of having a child. Maya had icy blue eyes. We had moved from the Lord Sinha Road house after Maxx passed away. Maya was less than three months old when we moved to Lake Gardens. One day she started breathing funny. Same evening, mum and I went to Maya’s paediatrician.

Shaun: I had reached the clinic by this time.

Pinky: The doctor himself drove us to Apollo to get her checked.

Shaun: He was very quiet throughout and said that we would have to admit her. The next 24 hours would be critical. She passed away pretty much within an hour and I suppose the rest is history but, this time at least we got a true diagnosis, it was recognised as infant cardiomyopathy, which is very rare.

Pinky: Same thing had happened to Maxx. It’s amazing how genetics work. I had decided that this was it. I didn’t want to adopt because firstly, I knew what it was to have my own children. In my mind, I thought what if I started comparing? Even if I didn’t compare, what kind of a mother would I be? The most paranoid, irritating mother.

How did you cope individually?

Pinky: Shaun threw himself into work and I into art, but we didn’t talk about it too much with each other. We had our own traumas to deal with. His parents didn’t even see the children.

Shaun: My mother was an emotional character. My father used to say it killed your mother way too early.

Pinky: It was all very internalised. I didn’t cry. When I woke up the next day, I thought to myself, why hadn’t I been woken up by a crying child? I realised there was no child. At that point, there were two things I could do. I could lie in this bed and cry and get into a deep hole and never come out of it. Easy to do. Or, the most difficult thing to do, get up, brush my teeth, and take a shower. It’s the most difficult thing I have done. It changed me completely. I am very strong and this made me realise what I am made of.

Shaun: A couple of days later I said we are doing some soft trials, just come.

Pinky: I went to the restaurant for a bit and before people started to arrive, I left and jumped in a cab and went home, thinking it’s too soon for me to talk about it. Once I reached home, I sat on the step for half an hour just blank and eventually thought to myself, it’s now or never. I took a shower, put on my high heels, make-up and went back to the restaurant and never looked back. I think after the first time, I blocked it out for more than a year. My friends didn’t want to face me, my family never even mentioned it, everyone was going through their own trauma I suppose.

Shaun: The first time it happened, I think for a whole year I blamed myself what we could have done more. Then when it happened for the second time, I realised it wasn’t in my hands and I couldn’t go through another year like that.

What did it do to your relationship?

Shaun: I think most people in that situation won’t be together. You both have your own issues to sort through, life is just not so simple.

Pinky: We were always there for each other. We were friends throughout and we never fought about it. We went along with life as life went along.

Shaun: I am a much more serious person now. I was much more happy-go-lucky, before all that. I am my mother’s son and up until that time, I was an emotional character, had breakdowns and tears, but since then I have been completely emotion-less. It’s much more practical.

Pinky: Nothing moves me any more. I know life throws you surprises and if you are not ready for it, you might as well face it and be ready for it. It has made me completely fearless and that’s my gift. I think of them with extreme fondness. I have given my life a direction. We’ve been good.

What would be your top tips to make a marriage work?

Shaun: I think people overcomplicate relationships. They are very simple. There is usually one overbearing character in a relationship, who wants to be in charge. And, that character ruins things for everybody around them because they are not getting their way. For us, we don’t tell each other what to do. We have long discussions about everything. We give each other lots of space to think. I travel a lot and she loves her time at home. We have similar interests. Art is a main part and we talk about art, music and we are interested in creative things. We are both being driven by creativity and excitement.

Pinky: Don’t take yourself too seriously. We are not a clingy type of couple. Also, we are not the kind of people who are aspiring to be something. In a lot of relationships that’s the problem. We like simplicity and love to move at our own pace. The foundation of our relationship was built on friendship and that is still very important to us. We enjoy each other’s space and the time we spend together.