The Perfect Complement

Strong, Driven and at the Top of Their Game, Zia and Jaydev Mody Present the Picture of a Convivial Marriage

- Amit Ranjan Rani

She was merely 13 and he 14. In their hearts, they knew they were meant to be, though they would not proclaim it. They would pretend to play cricket when the sun had long set, just to be with each other. They would play till 7 or 8 pm, though they would not see where the ball was being thrown. He was the handsome boy next door and she the prettiest girl in the neighbourhood. It was around 1969 when they first ran into each other and simply fell in love. Forty-eight years later, their love story is still being written. Zia and Jaydev Mody — reckoned as a power couple in the corporate world — have been each other’s strongest pillars ever since and their love hasn’t faded a bit. Zia, as we know her today, is one of the country’s finest legal brains, an authority on corporate law, and Jaydev, a business tycoon who runs a casino empire.

“We just fell in love and couldn’t stand to be apart,” recalls Zia of the days when the two, in their early teens, had got acquainted in the Mumbai locality where they lived. It was a case of opposites attract, she reckons. “He was terribly handsome, intelligent, very impulsive, intense and very different from my own character, which was cautious, conservative and slightly nervous about things unknown.”

Her good looks apart, it was Zia’s insatiable drive to excel at everything that fascinated Jaydev at age 14 and continues to even today. “As a child, she was always determined to be the best in whatever she did — whether it was topping the class or riding as a jockey at the gymkhana.” Even at 60, he says, she is still determined to be the best and doesn’t settle for any less.