Signing you in

Darshan Jariwala has responded to his estranged wife and fellow actor Apara Mehta’s claims. Last month, she claimed that back in the early 2000s, he walked out of their home after confessing that he’d “fallen out of love” with her and that she was “the ugliest woman” he’d ever seen. Jariwala and Mehta have been separated for 23 years, but haven’t divorced each other legally yet.

Reacting to Apara’s claims, Darshan said, “There’s a neurological phenomenon that with time, your memory of an event keeps changing. I can say very generously that it’s a case of false memory. The way it’s been narrated, nothing like that happened,” claimed Jariwala in a conversation with Siddharth Kannan.

“I’m not that kind of a guy who would even tell, let’s say a plain-looking woman, that she’s ugly. It would be a very irrelevant remark to make. If I know myself well, I’d talk about how the person is inside, and not really from outside,” he added.

Sharing that Apara Mehta is “absolutely welcome” to “play the victim card”, Darshan Jariwala confessed he’s moved on and is “very happy” where he’s right now. The actor has been living with interior designer and architect Anahita Italia since 2010. “I can’t even fathom why she’d want to talk about these things 23 years after being separated. And never before this! If this is the history, and she’s had the opportunity to take this to the media, why now?,” he said.

“We can’t sit in her mind and judge. I know my truth. My truth is my truth. There’s no limit to lies. I can’t even gauge her motivation,” said Jariwala. “The people who really know me know the entire story really well because my version doesn’t change. Truth has no versions,” he added.

Darshan blamed his separation with Apara on growing differently across the years since they got married back in 1982.

“Two people grow to be different. If you plant two saplings together, they’ll grow differently. Her priorities are different, mine were different. My circumstances changed because I was involved in an unsuccessful business venture. Even our thinking about how we want to deal with our careers was different. So, we tried to give the best childhood to our daughter. That’s where we were very clear. A relationship goes through changes sometimes,” said the actor.

Darsh Jariwala also explained why him and Apara Mehta never divorced legally. “I did file divorce papers, but the judge rejected the application. She didn’t give her consent,” said the actor, adding, “She’d agreed for divorce, but she changed her mind in front of the judge at the last minute. She’s probably playing a character of a nice, wronged victim.”

Recalling that one day, he “just walked out of their home,” giving his “very good house” in Santacruz West to his wife and their daughter, Darshan said, “That’s all I had to give to her. If someone had to ask for alimony, it should’ve been me because I was under those circumstances. But nothing like that happened.”

Since he didn’t have another house or even the money to pay rent, the actor lived at his friends’ place for some time before he could afford to rent out a small house. “But the circumstances were like that I went through that pain despite that,” said Jariwala.

After years of struggle, Darshan Jariwala landed a popular cola brand commercial with Aishwarya Rai, and then his National Award-winning breakthrough titular role in Feroz Abbas Khan’s 2007 period drama Gandhi, My Father.

During the interview, Darshan also spoke about his relationship with his daughter. He revealed that they are in regular touch and share a good relationship. “I’m quite good as a father. I keep in touch with her. I’m quite aware of all the developments in her life. She has a good channel of communication open with me. She also has a debit card from me,” said the actor. He also dismissed his wife’s claims that she’s raised their daughter singlehandedly. “Sometimes, we take a vacuum in our lives and try to decorate it. We put strangeness where there’s nothing, consciously or subconsciously,” claimed Jariwala.

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Darshan Jariwala first met Apara Mehta during rehearsals for a Gujarati play in which her mother was also performing alongside him. “We developed a friendship. We were very young at the time. I was 20-21. She was a couple of years younger than me,” recalled the actor. He further revealed they eloped because she was scared her parents would turn down their marriage because of caste issues.

Darshan also recounted that since he was pursuing a Chartered Accountancy course back then, he wasn’t as keen on the wedding as her. But since Apara was scared her parents would fix her up with someone else, she ended up marrying Darsan and living with him and his family after three months. His parents then got in touch with hers, and the couple got married again, this time with familial blessings.

However, Darshan dismissed Apara’s claim that she paid for his CA course. “I used to get a stipend from my Articleship as a CA. She began working much later, once we got married. I’d also just started acting in plays then. I was actually her senior, since I started working in 1976. She began working only in 1981,” added the actor.

However, once he hit a rough patch in his business during the early 1990s, Apara did help as she was already an established television star. “She did cover the household expenses for those three to four years. But back when we started dating, we were both earning small pockets of money,” said Darshan, adding that his father and elder brother fortunately didn’t expect him to pitch in with their household expenses.

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