In a chat with filmmaker Atul Taishete Mridula said that it was in 1993 when she first saw Pankaj.

“I saw my husband and he saw me on 23 May 1993 for the first time. Before that we had gotten photographs. It was for my brother’s wedding. A girl's picture had come. Her two brothers and parents were in the picture. That had come when I was in ninth and he was in eleventh,” she said.

Mridula shared that she took the pictures to school and showed it to her close friends back then.

“They saw my bhabhi but they also saw the two brothers. The Elder brother had gotten married and had kids and then the younger brother. My friends teased me that the younger brother will look nice with you.”

Mridula first saw Pankaj on the day of her brother’s tilak ceremony.

“We saw each other a lot in the tilak. I still tell Pankaj that I saw you when you had just started getting a beard and now I am seeing you when you have got glasses. It has been a long journey,” she recalled.

Talking about the love story, she said that the “liking was mutual and that he started looking for reasons to meet.”

Handkerchief played a major role in their love story.

“The conversation started like ‘haath dhoya to rumaal’ chahiye’ . So, I am the one to hand that over to him. ‘Rumaal dene main hi haath touch hogaya’ in that only you get butterflies,” she said.

Their conversations started very slowly.

“I used to say ‘aap’ my mother said to call him ‘bhaiya’ because he was my sister-in-law’s brother and is older than you by two years. That was a dilemma because I couldn't call him bhaiyya. I started with Pankaji ji. I never called him Bhaiyya or Pankaj.”

Mridula revealed that she calls Pankaj as “pati” and the two have a daughter named Aashi Tripathi.

“Till date I call him pati. When he would come to Calcutta (Kolkata) in 6 months or a year he would purposely touch my foot. He is very naughty. A small love story that began in 1993 we completed in 2004 by getting married.”

The two never formally confessed their love to each other as she said it was very ‘organic”. However, she did say that it was her, who wrote a letter to him about getting married when he was in National School Of Drama in New Delhi.