What would it be like to marry someone you’ve been with for 17 years? It’s something this writer wondered on her way to meet filmmaker Hansal Mehta and his long-time partner and “new bride” Safeena Husain. We were obviously not expecting them to be all coy. Perhaps, we were looking for traces of this new relationship that binds them. “I wonder why anyone would be interested in our story,” Hansal tells us, curious that we were actually curious. Safeena joins us moments later, and sits across her husband on a three-seater sofa at their Bandra home. “Paas aajao,” he says. “Tum aajao,” she teases, “Or else people will think that it was me who was chasing you. Jabki sachayi kuch aur hai.”

The day we meet, it has been exactly two weeks since their “secret wedding” in San Francisco. Theirs wasn’t the kind of ostentatious shaadi that Bollywood is now known for. In fact, their daughter Kimaya played pap with a DSLR that had been gifted to her a few weeks earlier. The wedding happened in a lawyer’s office in California that had been modestly decorated with plastic flowers, drapes and heart-shaped cardboard cutouts, with ‘Love’ scribbled on them—Hansal clarifies this wasn’t his doing. It was a pre-designed set on the mezzanine floor of the office for the many marriages that the lawyer was registering that day. But even while breaking away from the typical, they stuck to the filmi rule book: They announced their wedding on Instagram.