UNITING FORCE

course there would be days when I’d just want him next to me,” she says. “But I told myself that this relationship was my choice. No one had forced me into this. This was my life and I was only too glad to be in this relationship.”

On 26 September 2014, the couple tied the knot in a traditional Maharashtrian wedding. Even though invitations had been sent to only 700 people, nearly 1,500 people showed up— perhaps a testament to how much everyone rooted for them then and still do.

For Radhika, however, the wedding also meant tolerating Ajinkya’s laid-backness.

“He was wearing just a yellow T-shirt and jeans—at his own wedding,” she laughs. “I was so annoyed, but kept it together. The first rituals were him wearing just that!”

When they enter Prabhat Shetty’s photography studio in Andheri on a balmy afternoon, it is apparent what Ajinkya and Radhika mean to each other. There is an ease in the way they navigate spaces, despite this being their first joint shoot. And there are no needlessly romantic grandstanding gestures that some celebrities might indulge in to prove a point.

“Our daughter, Aarya, is at home,” Ajinkya tells me. “She naps for two hours in the afternoon from 2 pm and that’s when things calm down a little for us.”

The mention of Aarya lights both of them up. The two-year-old is clearly the glowing nucleus of their lives.

“She will get excited and happy about the smallest of things,” says Radhika. “You could give her a small piece of candy and her day is made. She gets just as excited seeing her grandparents.”

Ajinkya believes that this sense of joyfulness has always been part of children’s personalities, across generations. He had been that way too, he says. “And then life happens and you tend to forget how to locate happiness in the most humble places,” he shrugs.

His own childhood, he says, was challenging. “We lived in a small house in Dombivali and my parents went out of their way just so that I could afford a cricket kit,” he recounts.

Travelling from the suburb of Dombivali for nearly two hours every day to train for hours on end at the legendary Azad Maidan, Ajinkya’s life was a series of crests and troughs. On days when he felt he was slacking, he’d be suffused with guilt. “I’d think that since my parents were sacrificing so much for me, that there was no room for complacency,” he says.

While his days were filled with cricket sessions, evenings were reserved for karate classes. “My father wanted me to go out because somehow I always preferred being indoors and

“[AJINKYA IS SO LAID-BACK] HE WAS WEARING JUST A YELLOW T-SHIRT AND JEANS AT HIS OWN WEDDING. I WAS SO ANNOYED, BUT KEPT IT TOGETHER.” —RADHIKA RAHANE