Mahesh Bhatt recalls how Pooja Bhatt reacted to his affair with Soni Razdan

Bollywood actor Soni Razdan has been married to Indian director Mahesh Bhatt since the past several decades.

And despite being one of the most loved couples in the industry, the two had faced their share of troubles in the relationship.

An unearthed interview of the couple has been making rounds on the internet where the director got candid about his struggles with alcohol and his wife’s patience to deal with it all, including the flak she received from his family from his first wife.

“She (Soni) coped with my most difficult phase when my drinking had become almost a disease. To be able to cope with that phase of mine, when I turned everything I touched into a wasteland, must have been quite traumatic. She has put up with a lot, she has lived with the aberration of my other family, without making a big issue out of it,” he said in an interview with Simi Garewal in 1998.

Soni was asked whether or not she had resentment towards Mahesh’s first wife and her family, to which she said: “For a while, maybe, but that went away over the years. We get along very well now, but we’d had our fights. Initially, when we weren’t married, there were problems. But after that, once I got married to him, we’ve been very, very good to each other.”

Mahesh joined in, saying: “There was resentment early on. She was this evil seductress who took their papa away. I let them express their rage, their anger.”

He went on to say that his relationship with Soni prior to their marriage was never hidden from his eldest daughter Pooja from his first marriage.

“I went and told her that this is what was going on between your father and this girl. She just looked at me and she shook her head. I don’t know what it meant,” he recalled.

In a separate interview, Pooja also admitted to having resentment towards Soni in the beginning: “Initially, I did resent my dad for leaving my mother for another woman. I also used to hate Soni for snatching away dad from us. In fact, there used to be times when I used to flare-up at the very mention of her name.”