Lalit Modi’s name still instantly evokes the Indian Premier League (IPL), its birth, its money, its controversies, and his eventual exit from India. For years, the dominant narrative around him has been about power, exile and scandal. But in a recent conversation with Karishma Mehta for Humans of Bombay, Lalit Modi opened up about his family, his late wife Minal, and the one regret that haunts him more than any professional fallout.Spoiler: His biggest regret is not leaving India. It’s about what happened, or rather, what didn’t happen, in the years when the people he loved needed him the most.
A love story that didn’t fit the rules
Long before the IPL, there was Minal. She wasn’t just “Lalit Modi’s wife”; she was a chapter that began well before he became a public figure. Minal first entered his life as a family friend. Their parents were close, and he had known of her for years. She was married, lived in London, and was ten years older than him. He was a young man in India about to leave for the United States for studies.Their bond truly began when he was 18 and joined her and her daughter, Karima, on a trip to Kashmir. That holiday shifted something. A familiar face became a close friend. Later, when he started flying back and forth to America, London turned into a permanent stopover, Lalit shared. Minal’s parents hosted him, and she took him around the city. Slowly, shared trips, conversations and jokes turned into something deeper. Somewhere between airports and evenings out, Lalit fell in love, despite knowing she was married and much older.In his early twenties, around 1985, he told her how he felt. The confession cost him their friendship. They stopped speaking and drifted apart for years. He returned to India, joined the family business, and buried himself in work. Life, on the surface, moved on.
When fate circled back and love dug its heels in
New Year’s Eve, 1989. Fort Aguada, Goa. Their story resumed where they’d left off—by chance, or perhaps not. Minal was at the same party. During dinner, he learned she was now divorced. Later, they walked along the beach. He kissed her.From that night onward, Lalit says he never formally proposed. “We just knew we would be together.” What followed was a hidden romance. For a year, their relationship remained secret. She was older, divorced, and a mother; details that shook the foundations of his conservative family. But, their love survived his family’s opposition and finally the duo got married in 1991.Lalit calls his love for Minal “love at first sight” stretched over ten years which included years of silence, friendship, rebellion, and finally, marriage. She became his companion, his witness, and the person who knew him completely.
Photo: Lalit Modi/ Instagram
The day everything changed
In December 2018, Minal died at the age of 64. She had been battling cancer for years, but Lalit says it wasn’t the cancer itself that ended her life. A friend had encouraged her to try an alternative treatment in Berlin. That treatment caused fluid to accumulate in her lungs. On her way to Dubai, she collapsed and was hospitalised.Recalling that period, he told Karishma Mehta how they had all gathered around her bed on the fateful day of her death. She was unwell, but he genuinely didn’t expect her to die that day. Just ten days earlier, she had hosted a dinner party for him and seemed stable. On her final day, all the children were there. At one point, she asked them to go and freshen up, promising they’d play cards afterward. While he was getting ready, she slipped away. He believes she knew her time had come and didn’t want her family to see her final moments.The shock hit him hard. He suffered a heart attack and was rushed to hospital. The next day, he attended her funeral. “After that,” he says, “it was never the same.”
A spiral he couldn’t pull himself out of
If losing Minal cracked him, what came next deepened the fracture. The following year, his father passed away. Already shattered, this second loss pushed him further inward. He stopped meeting people and withdrew into himself. “The following year my father passed away and it was the biggest slump of my life. I stopped meeting people and went into depression. It took me a long, long time to get out of it,” Modi said in the interview.He says he began slowly emerging from that fog around 2022, when his daughter Aliya Modi was getting married in Venice. The wedding was beautiful. But beneath the photos and celebrations lay a guilt he still carries. His daughter had planned the entire wedding on her own. He wasn’t emotionally present in the way he believes a father should be. “I started to get out of it in 2022, when my daughter was getting married. She planned the whole wedding on her own in Venice. It was a beautiful wedding. But I was never there for them (emotionally); I can never forgive myself for that,” Modi shared.
Lalit Modi (Image credit: Wisden Cricket)
The regret that hurts more than exile
People often assume Lalit Modi’s biggest regret would be leaving India, losing his position, or the way the IPL chapter ended. In this interview, he makes it clear: it isn’t.His deepest regret is far more personal. It’s that in the years after his wife Minal’s death, when his children were mourning, growing, and reaching major milestones, he was locked inside his own grief. He didn’t show up for them the way he wishes he had. For all the drama attached to his name, it’s this quiet, deeply human failure that sits heaviest on his heart.
