Tina and Akshay Kumar are Bollywood’s most endearing and enduring couple. They are fun people: warm and caring hosts; and, entertaining conversationalists. I discovered all this one-night many year ago when I had dinner at their charming sea-facing Juhu residence. An IPL match was going on at Eden Gardens. Tina sat talking to me and elegantly ate with her fingers. Frank Sinatra’s Strangers in The Night was playing softly in the background. Akshay was in the kitchen. Getting the cook to make halwa. Or so I thought. “He’s slyly watching cricket on the TV there,” Tina airily told me. She was right. He came out and said, “This match is thrown!” I wondered how he had figured that out. Tina said, “He’s crazy about cricket. And he’s savvy about finance and figures and people – that’s how he knows.”
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Bollywood’s action hero is a different man at home. In between films, if the couple isn’t holidaying abroad with their kids, then he chills out with the family. Tina and he spend time walking in the garden, hand-in-hand, talking and sipping drinks. “When he thinks I’m not looking, he chucks the wine in the bushes,” Tina complained. When he’s at home, Akshay sometimes makes a valiant attempt at helping with the kids’ homework. “I get a call at work and Akshay wants to know what’s a noun and what’s an adjective,” Tina laughed, “and when I get back, I find the homework is all wrong!” Work for her besides being a wife, mother and daughter, is her designer store White Window in Bandra. She’s one of our leading interior designers. Now, also one of our bestselling authors and most widely read columnists. And soon-to-be a debut-making producer with their film PadMan.
Akshay swept his hand around their tastefully decorated home and told me proudly, “She’s designed this whole place. My contribution has only been silence.”
I like to think Tina has designed Akshay as well. Giving him a stylish edge and a touch of class that he never had. “I did a normal wife thing, it was not a deliberate attempt to style Akshay,” she said. “But the principles were the same as at work. There was a good, clear-cut foundation, and it was well accessorized.” She herself is one of India’s classiest women, faultless in her dress sense, stylish in her ways, impeccable in her manners.” Over coffee after dinner, I asked Tina how she rated Akshay, and without hesitation, she said, “On a scale of 1 to 10, I’d give him 7 as an actor, 9 as a husband and 11 as a father.” Akshay is a wise man, he preferred not to rate Tina, instead, he leaned across to whisper, “She’s clear and straightforward, Hafeez Contractor says good things about her work, look at the way she keeps the house, takes care of the children, manages her business, deals with the staff... I don’t think I can ask for more.”
I was happy for him, for her, and for them. Akshay is a content man. He may not have wanted more. But Tina did. “I want a National Award for Akshay,” she told me then. “He’s a simple, hard-working guy, very focused in his work, incredibly smart, but he’ll never pretend to be more than what he is. It’s my ambition that he gets the National Award. I have a shelf ready for it!" It happened for them last April when Akshay got the Best Actor National Award for his stoic, emotionally controlled performance in the film Rustom. He was going to turn 50 in a few months’ time. And he had just completed 30 years in cinema. What a nice time for it to happen. I wonder if the figures worked in his favour.
