When Dilip Kumar proposed to Saira Banu, she asked ‘How many girls have you said this to?’

A short while later, Dilip proposed marriage, and while he would have expected her to say yes, she gave a rather strange response that left him shocked. Dilip recalled that day and said that they met at a lounge to spend some time, but that day, he was repeatedly getting calls from an ex he had recently broken up with, and this irked Saira. “Unfortunately, at the Sea Lounge also I was paged repeatedly on the phone by a lady friend with whom I had broken off a relationship months ago. This had been stressful phase of my life,” he recalled.

On their way home, Dilip parked the car at the seafront and they shared a moment of silence when Dilip popped the question. “I looked at her and said: ‘Saira, you are not the kind of girl I want to drive around with, or be seen around with … I would like to marry you … will you be my wife?’” But Saira was still miffed with the calls that Dilip had been getting the whole day so her response wasn’t an ecstatic yes. “Saira just turned around sharply to answer me with ‘… and how many girls have you said this to?’ Normally, I would have been enraged with such a line, but instead, enamoured with her straightforwardness and simplicity, I found myself telling her that she was loveable and I wanted her to be my wife,” he recalled and added, “I knew deep within me that I had found the woman with whom I wanted to share my life, my sorrows and my joys. As she smiled and held me in her gaze with the love of a woman who had loved me since she was in her teens, we slowly drove back to Nepean Sea Road to her mother’s Sea Belle flat. I said I wanted Naseem Aapaa, Ammaji and Sultan and his wife Rahat Beg’s approval, that I sought her hand.”

Saira Banu and Dilip Kumar were married for 55 years. (Photo: Express Archives)

Dilip also admitted that an astrologer had made predictions about his wife back in 1955 and while he did not believe it at the time, he went back to this memory after he fell in love with Saira and decided to marry her. The Devdas actor said in Coimbatore, he met an astrologer who was famous for the accuracy of his predictions. “He categorically told me that I would marry late when I would be in my forties and my bride would be a girl half my age, as fair and beautiful as the moon and she would keep me on the lids of her eyes and love and worship me unselfishly, unconditionally. He also predicted that she would be from the same profession – to this I categorically commented: ‘Never! I will not marry a girl from my profession!’ Unfazed, he went on to say that, soon after the marriage, she would take the blow of my ‘karmas’ with a prolonged and near-fatal illness to absolve me and she would go through it ungrudgingly.”

Dilip and Saira got married on October 11, 1966 and stayed married till 2011.