Nayantara and Prabudeva at Siddique's daughter Sumayya's reception

Last Friday evening, Prabhu Deva and Nayanthara were the cynosure of all eyes at Malayalam director Siddique’s daughter Sumaiah’s wedding reception in Kochi. It was the first time that the couple had come together for a public function in Kerala. The duo was earlier spotted together at an award function in Hyderabad. They also danced together at a recent event to honour Tamil Nadu chief minister M Karunanidhi in Chennai.

Now, it looks like Prabhu and Nayan have formalised their relationship after weathering a stormy outburst from Prabhu’s wife Ramlath, who, in an interview, had threatened to beat up Nayanthara publicly. There have been various reports on the Internet and the Tamil media about the duo being spotted at tourist locales in the US, France and Indonesia.

According to sources close to the elusive actress, she is slowly withdrawing from films, though two of her recent releases — Aadhavan in Tamil and Simha in Telugu — were superhits. At the moment, Nayan is only doing offbeat director Shyama Prasad’s Electra in Malayalam, in which Manisha Koirala and Prakash Rai play her parents. Nayanthara has been flooded with offers of projects featuring top Tamil and Telugu actors, but will take a call on her next film after the release of her upcoming Tamil film, Boss Engira Bhaskaran, in June. But rumours suggest that she’s more keen on settling down with Prabhu once his divorce comes through.

A character artiste who attended the wedding reception at Kochi, said, “I have never seen Nayan and Prabhu so happy; they mingled well with their friends at the wedding and behaved like a newly-married couple still very much in love.”