Dharamsala isn’t a place you associate with emotional reckoning. It’s mountain air and cricket and the kind of crowd noise that rattles your chest from three rows back. But on the evening of May 15, somewhere between the cheering and the matching red outfits and the photographs that would end up all over the internet by morning, Celina Jaitly sat with something heavier than team spirit. And she wrote about it.
Not for the algorithm. Not for the press cycle. For Preity Zinta.
The note she posted that night was the kind of thing that makes you stop scrolling. Not because it was dramatic or carefully crafted for maximum reach, but because it wasn’t. It had the texture of something real. “In my darkest times, one of the biggest lights in my life is my darling, sweetheart, the one and only queen, Preity Zinta.” You don’t arrive at a sentence like that through a PR brainstorm. You arrive at it through actual experience of darkness, and actual experience of someone pulling you through it.
And Celina Jaitly has had her share of darkness this year. More than her share, honestly.
She filed a complaint against her husband Peter Haag earlier in 2026, an Austrian businessman she married in 2010, accusing him of physical cruelty, manipulation, and emotional and verbal violence. Mumbai Police registered the FIR.
A Look Out Circular was issued. She sought Rs 50 crore in damages, Rs 10 lakh in monthly maintenance. Cold, clinical numbers that don’t begin to hold the weight of what it takes to get to that point. The couple have three sons, Winston, Viraaj, and Arthur. They also lost a child years before all of this. A son named Samsher, who didn’t survive a hypoplastic heart condition. Grief like that doesn’t have an expiry date. It just becomes part of how you move through the world.
Which makes it mean something, the fact that she showed up in Dharamsala at all.
She didn’t have to be there. She could have stayed home, stayed quiet, stayed out of the public eye while the legal proceedings ran their course. Instead she turned up in red, stood next to one of her closest friends, screamed for a cricket team, and then wrote something that had nothing to do with cricket at all.
She talked about how Preity is seen by the world, the beauty, the films, the decades of a career that never really slowed down, the sheer staying power of a woman who entered this industry and simply refused to be temporary. But then Celina said something that landed differently. That Preity’s heart is every bit as stunning and as phenomenal as she is on the outside. That’s not a compliment you hand out casually. That’s the kind of thing you say about someone who has shown you, in private, without an audience, exactly who they are.
Preity Zinta co-owns the Punjab Kings. She cheers for them the way most people can only cheer for things they built themselves, loudly, without embarrassment, with her whole body in it. Gene Goodenough, her husband, was there that evening. So was actor Pratibha Ranta. All of them in red, all of them together, all of them photographed in that easy way of people who genuinely like each other.
Celina called her the only queen who owns the kings. It’s a good line. But underneath the warmth of it is something more specific. She said she felt proud standing next to Preity that night. Proud of her spirit, her passion, her love for the team. That word, proud, does a lot of work in a sentence. It’s not the word you use for someone you admire from a distance. It’s the word you use for someone whose journey you’ve watched up close.
Here’s the thing about female friendship in Bollywood. It exists, genuinely and deeply, but it rarely gets shown without some kind of performance around it. The birthday tributes, the award show moments, the carefully timed reunions. What Celina wrote on May 15 didn’t feel like any of that. It felt like a woman exhaling. Like someone who had been holding a lot saying, out loud, that she was not holding it alone.
PBKS lost that night. Six wickets to Mumbai Indians. Their fifth consecutive defeat after six straight wins at the start of the season. Momentum in cricket, like in most things, is harder to hold onto than anyone would like. But honestly, the score feels beside the point when you look at those photographs. Two women in red at a cricket ground in the hills, one of them in the middle of the hardest year of her life, both of them still there, still cheering, still standing.
Some people show you who they are on their best days. Preity Zinta, it turns out, shows up on yours.
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Sana has been covering film, fame, and everything in between for over a decade. From red carpets to rehab rumors, she brings nuance, wit, and an insider’s edge to every story. When she’s not reporting, she’s probably watching Koffee With Karan reruns or doom-scrolling celebrity IG feeds.
