Actor Juhi Chawla was at the peak of her career in 1996 when she had secretly married businessman Jay Mehta with just a few close friends and family members in attendance.
In a recent interview with Rajeev Masand, Juhi was asked why she kept her wedding a secret initially to which she said, "At that time, you did not have the internet and you did not have cameras on every phone, so you could do it that way. I was just about established and doing well. That’s the time Jay was serenading me and I was afraid of losing my career just when I had kind of got there. I wanted to carry on and this seemed the midway."
For the uninformed, during the shooting of her film Duplicate in 1998, Juhi got the ‘horrific’ news that her mother Mona Chawla passed away in a freak accident and during that time Jay became her support system, helping her recover from the tragedy. "That was a very difficult time for me because I felt I was going to lose everything I loved," Juhi said.
Juhi also opened up about her love story with Jay and how it started and said, that their first meeting was even before she entered Bollywood. "That was briefly and with friends, from then on, everywhere I went, he turned up. Everywhere I looked, he was there with flowers and notes and gifts. Every day! On my birthday, I remember he sent me a truckload of red roses. I was like, ‘What do you do with a truckload of flowers?’ He did all he could. After a year, he proposed," she said.
Juhi and Jay have been happily married for almost two and a half decades now, and have two children, a daughter named Janhavi and son named Arjun.
