Lalit Modi’s 5 big revelations about love and life: ‘Diamond Digger’ remark, dating Sushmita Sen, one regret that still haunts him |

Image credit: Wisden Cricket

Lalit Modi’s name instantly brings the Indian Premier League (IPL), its glamour, money, bold ideas, and controversy to mind. He’s long been painted as the flamboyant businessman who changed Indian cricket and then vanished from the country amid scandals and legal troubles. But behind the headlines is a man who has loved deeply, grieved heavily, made mistakes, and is still trying to make sense of it all. In a candid interview with Karishma Mehta for Humans of Bombay, Lalit opened up about the women in his life, his biggest regrets, and how love has both grounded and broken him. Here are five of his most striking revelations about love and life:

1. How he met and fell in love with his late wife, Minal

Lalit describes Minal first as a family friend. She was married, beautiful, and someone he’d known since childhood through their parents. Their connection deepened when he was around 18 and about to move to the US; she lived in London and they grew closer during a trip to Kashmir with her daughter, Garima. Over time, she became his closest friend. He would stop over in London on his way to America, staying at her parents’ home while she showed him around, Modi said. Somewhere in those years of friendship, he fell in love with her, despite the fact that she was 10 years older and married.In his early 20s, around 1985, he confessed his feelings to her, and they stopped talking for years. Life moved on. It wasn’t until 1989, at a New Year’s party at Fort Aguada in Goa, that their story took a turn. Over dinner, he learned she was now divorced. Later that night, they went for a walk on the beach, and he kissed her. That moment shifted them from friends to partners, and eventually, they married and built a life together, which would be tested by public scandals and private battles with illness.

2. How the IPL affected his family

While the world saw the drama of the IPL and its controversies, Lalit now admits he was slow to realise how deeply it impacted his family. In 2010, when everything around the league was exploding, his wife Minal was simultaneously fighting cancer and undergoing treatment in Los Angeles. His eldest daughter, Aaliya, couldn’t handle the threats to his life and the relentless media scrutiny; she moved to Switzerland to escape the pressure, Modi shared. His son stayed back in India, while Lalit himself travelled back and forth, trying to juggle family crises and IPL responsibilities.He now sees that while he was consumed by the league and its fallout, his family was quietly breaking under the weight of fear, instability, and distance. He admits he truly understood the emotional cost only later, when the noise faded and the losses,in health, time, and togetherness, became impossible to ignore. The scandal wasn’t just a professional storm; it shook the foundation of his home.

In 2022, Lalit Modi shocked the internet by announcing he was dating Sushmita Sen, sharing vacation photos and clarifying they were “not married—just dating.” The relationship immediately sparked jokes and criticism, with many calling Sushmita a “gold digger” for being with a billionaire. In his recent Humans of Bombay interview, Lalit pushed back hard against that narrative and turned it on its head.He described Sushmita as a self-made, very wealthy woman who owns diamond stores and, in his words, “has more diamonds than anybody I know.” He insisted she never relied on him financially. In fact, he said that whenever they went out, she was the one who paid, and he joked that he felt like a “kept boyfriend.” He called her proud, independent, and remarkable; someone who would never accept handouts.So when people mocked her as a gold digger, Lalit flipped the script and said, “No, Lalit was a diamond digger.” For him, she was the diamond; someone who is rare, powerful, and fully capable of standing on her own. He added that she could have anyone she wanted; their connection, he insisted, was never about money.

4. His biggest regret in life

Talking about Minal’s death in December 2018, Lalit’s tone shifts from playful to deeply raw. He says he never expected her to die when she did. Ten days before, she had hosted a dinner party and seemed stable. It wasn’t cancer itself that took her, he says, but an alternative treatment she’d gone to try in Berlin, which led to her lungs filling with fluid. On her way to Dubai, she collapsed and was hospitalised.On her final day, all their children were present. On the day she passed, she asked them to go freshen up, promising they’d play cards afterward. While Lalit was getting ready, she quietly slipped away. He believes she knew it was her time and didn’t want them to see her final moments. The shock hit him so hard that he suffered a heart attack and was rushed to a hospital. The next day, he attended her funeral.He describes the period that followed as the darkest slump of his life. The following year, his father passed away, deepening his grief. He withdrew, stopped meeting people, and fell into depression. He says he only began to emerge from that emotional fog around 2022, when his daughter was getting married in Venice. Yet even that moment carries regret: he feels he wasn’t truly present for his children, that his daughter planned her wedding on her own, and he still struggles to forgive himself for emotionally abandoning them during those years.

5. How he met his current partner, Rima Bouri

Today, Lalit says he has a “very beautiful partner,” Rima Bouri, of Lebanese descent. She is someone who has been woven into his life story for decades, Modi shared. They first met 26 years ago at a sangeet in South Africa. At the time, he was newly married to Minal, and Rima was newly married as well. She was a close friend of his sister-in-law (Minal’s sister), and their families moved in the same circles.Lalit recalls seeing her for the first time and, half-joking, half-intuitively, telling her, “I will marry you one day.” Everyone burst into laughter. His wife teased him for appreciating beautiful women, and Rima’s husband played along with a light-hearted joke. What could have been a strange moment instead became a running joke in the family. Over the years, Rima remained a close family friend; her children grew up alongside his.Only much later, after loss, time, and drastic changes in his life, did that old line, “I will marry you one day”, take on a different kind of meaning. Their long-standing friendship slowly shifted into companionship and love. For Lalit, Rima represents not a replacement for Minal, but a new chapter; one that honours the past while allowing him to move forward.Lalit Modi’s story, as told in this interview, isn’t just about scandal or glamour. It’s about a man who has loved boldly, lost heavily, made controversial choices, and still believes in living life to the fullest.