Over a theatre career spanning more than two decades, actor Pratik Gandhi has experienced several on-stage highs. But his favourite unarguably dates back to 2005, when, while doing cartwheels for an experimental, no-dialogue rendering of an Anton Chekhov play, his eyes, for a brief fraction of a second, fell on a woman in the audience watching him with a mix of awe and amusement. In that fleeting moment, a thought crossed his mind: “I’d like to know her.”

We are in the study of Pratik’s Juhu apartment when he relays the incident to this writer. His wife, Bhamini Oza, walks in a few minutes later. Their eyes meet and they exchange a knowing smile — it almost feels like a replay of the story, requiring little imagination once I am told that it was, in fact, Bhamini whom he had noticed from across the stage.

“I’d never seen anyone do cartwheels before,” she says now, admitting she was blown away by his performance. She also remembers feeling mildly embarrassed when she caught him staring at her. “As a theatre actress myself, I thought it was not very professional of him,” she adds, blushing.

Last December, the couple celebrated 17 years of marriage, a milestone that also marks a new phase in their professional lives. Pratik and Bhamini, who were previously seen together in the short documentary Shimmy (2021) and have collaborated on several plays, including Sir Sir Sarla (Gujarati), will now share screen space as husband and wife on celluloid for the first time, portraying Mahatma Gandhi and Kasturba in Hansal Mehta’s Gandhi. The web series, which recently had its world premiere at the 50th Toronto International Film Festival, is set to release on OTT this year.

It’s the kind of collaboration the two had been hoping for, for years. “We’re always looking forward to each other’s projects. Every new work feels like a joint initiative — discussions about how we’re going to approach a character, how it will land with the audience, all of it,” says Bhamini.

Working together in a film or web show, they knew, would make these exchanges richer. “I was only waiting to get something substantial,” she adds.

Both Pratik and Bhamini have a rich theatrical repertoire, supplemented by the work they’ve done in television and film. Bhamini made her acting debut in 1999 and went on to be part of several acclaimed Gujarati plays such as The Waiting Rooms, Ek Chhokri Saav, Dastaan Goi, and Bombay Flower, as well as Hindi shows like Sarabhai vs Sarabhai and Khichdi.

Pratik, who grew up in Surat and was involved with the stage since childhood, moved to Mumbai in 2004 after landing a corporate job. He also used this time to explore opportunities in theatre — his work in Mere Piya Gaye Rangoon (a Hindi adaptation of Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well) and Mohan’s Masala, a monologue in which he plays the role of MK Gandhi and which he has performed in three languages since 2015, remains unparalleled.

Their paths crossed because of their connection to theatre and a few common friends. “But it took me another two years after I saw her in the audience to really ask her out for coffee,” says Pratik. It wasn’t that he didn’t pursue her during this time, shares Bhamini. He would try to get to know her on the pretext of sharing audition dates for different plays happening in the city.

“I thought, let’s start from somewhere,” he says, smiling. Not a huge fan of staged meetings, Bhamini kept a comfortable distance from him. “I was already very busy working, doing theatre and television simultaneously. To be honest, I also wanted things to happen organically.”

After months of giving chase, Pratik finally found the courage to ask Bhamini out. They met at a suburban outlet of a fancy coffee chain, sometime in 2007. “I was a tea drinker, so I didn’t even know what to order on the menu,” he says. “And I drank neither coffee nor tea,” adds Bhamini. Between them, they settled for one cappuccino, which they loaded with sachets of sugar, because of how much they disliked it. A year later, they were married.

For Pratik, his breakout moment came with Mehta’s Scam 1992, a biographical drama on stockbroker Harshad Mehta, which released five years ago, in the middle of the pandemic. By then, it had been four years since he had quit his freelance consultancy job in the corporate sector. He credits his father Jayant Gandhi — an educator and trained classical dancer — and Bhamini for giving him the courage to follow his dreams.

“She was the first one to say, ‘Just go for it.’ If not for her support, I wouldn’t have been able to take that leap. We had a huge home loan to pay, we had a young daughter, and my father too had been diagnosed with cancer,” he says, adding, “For the longest time, I was balancing both these lives together. What I did in the process was almost take away the time that I was supposed to give her for the craft. I think it was selfish of me,” he says, in hindsight.

Bhamini disagrees, telling him, “Even if I hadn’t been there in your life, you would still be where you are today — purely because of your consistent work. When a person works in the same direction, with the same passion and positive hard work, it is bound to pay off. There’s no two ways about it.”

Playing his wife on screen — and that too, the role of Kasturba, for which she went through the rigours of auditioning — she says, was exciting. “While there are so many books on the Mahatma, we know so little about his significant other,” says Bhamini.

“This show really does justice to her life,” she adds, without revealing too much. Pratik remembers how effortless the first day of shooting together was. “I think years of doing theatre prepares you for this moment. It felt like we were back on stage. The lines came so easily to us,” he says, adding, “There are, however, a couple of scenes that I can’t wait for the world to watch, both the ones we share and some of Bhamini’s on her own. It’s going to be an explosion.”