When Hema Malini Said 'Fingers Were Pointed' at Her Wedding with Dharmendra: 'People Discuss Me With Pity...'

Hema Malini and Dharmendra are among the most talked about celebrity couples in Bollywood, especially because Hema is the actor’s second wife. Dharmendra was still married to Prakash Kaur when he fell in love with Hema Malini. The actress has often spoken about why she fell in love with Dharmendra and how she was aware of everything people said behind their backs.

“I just knew that he made me happy. And all I wanted was happiness,” she shared in her biography Hema Malini: Beyond the Dream Girl. She also shared that she was aware of the accusations being made about her. “Fingers were pointed. Accusations were flung at us. Nobody said anything in front of me, but I was not a fool. I knew that they discussed me behind my back. It wasn’t easy,” she shared in the biography and added that she was also called “first lady of second marriages”.

Hema Malini’s parents weren’t happy when they learnt that their daughter was in love with a married man. Hema Malini was asked to marry someone else but she insisted that Dharmendra should marry her. Speaking to Simi Garewal earlier, she recalled, “I called him and I said, ‘You’ll have to marry me now.’ He said, ‘Yeah, I’ll marry you.’ So that is how it happened.”

Reflecting on being the superstar’s second wife, she told Lehren Retro earlier, “Nobody wants to be like that; it happens. Automatically, what happens, you have to accept. Otherwise, nobody will feel like they want to live their life like this. Every woman wants to have a husband, children, like a normal family. But somewhere, it went out of the way… I am not feeling bad about it, or sulking about it. I am happy with myself. I have my two children, and I have brought them up very well.”

“I know there are sections of people who discuss me with pity. They make me out to be someone who is weeping and mourning at home, pining for my man who is not around. I am not a police officer who needs to keep tabs on him. And I don’t need to show people a roll-call register as to how many days he visits me and how many days he doesn’t. He knows his duty as a father and I’ve never had to remind him of it. Dharam-ji still treats me like he did in the initial days,” she wrote in her book.