The ice-cube size diamond ring she is wearing today might suggest otherwise, but it’s not unusual to find Nita Ambani in the trenches. In the past years she has built a series of enterprises that are proud success stories in contemporary India, including an international preparatory school, a Premier League cricket team, the nation’s first Braille newspaper in Hindi, and a 400-acre model township that houses 12,000 people and stands adjacent to the world’s largest oil refinery. A 400-bed hospital wing is under construction and plans are proceeding for a world-class university on 1,000 acres of property.

While it is true that all of these undertakings are owned or financed by her husband, Mukesh, the richest person in India and the 19th-richest in the world, Nita has earned respect in her own right throughout the country for her vision, drive, and willingness to get her jeweled and manicured fingers dirty. Lately, she has been referred to as “corporate India’s first lady.”

So it must be a source of frustration that, notwithstanding her accomplishments, the international press remains fixated upon her house.

Yes, that house: Antilia, the recently erected 27-story, 400,000-square-foot Xanadu in Mumbai that she shares with her three children and Mukesh, 54, who is worth $22.3 billion. (After a surge in the Indian stock market in 2007, he was briefly thought to be the world’s richest man.)

Between the time construction commenced, in 2008, and when it was completed, in late 2010, press coverage of the dwelling grew ever more fantastical and rabid. Does it really have its own air-traffic-control system and three heliports? Can it create its own weather? The intrigue peaked last October when The New York Times ran a prominent piece reporting that the family had yet to move in, perhaps due to glitches with respect to Vastu Shastra, the Hindu philosophy that guides directional alignments in architecture to create spiritual harmony. As they have from the beginning, the Ambanis provided no comment. “It’s a private home. There is no reason to discuss it in public,” responded a spokesman for Reliance Industries, Mukesh’s conglomerate and India’s largest private-sector company. The closed-door policy has only piqued the worldwide fascination that has surrounded the edifice.

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So, on a November afternoon, seated in Nita’s sleek white office in Mumbai’s business district, I sense a certain tension when, at the end of a genial interview about her business and philanthropic endeavors, I steer the conversation toward what can only be described as the elephant in the room. Two press aides, seated on an adjacent sofa, clench.

Nita Ambani, a lovely 49-year-old brunette, measures her words carefully. “This is the first time I am talking about my home,” she says, exhaling. “There have been exaggerated reports in the media about it, I must say.”

But she sets the record straight on one point. “We moved in two months ago,” she explains. “And then it was going around that we haven’t moved in!” she adds with a mildly exasperated laugh.

In the hierarchy of India’s modern history, just next to Mohandas Gandhi there is Dhirubhai Ambani, Nita’s late father-in-law. In fact, Gandhi and Ambani came from the same background, both belonging to the Modh Bania, a commercial caste in Gujarat state, in northwestern India, and they were both messianic figures, too. Despite this common lineage, the two are opposites in all other ways. While the former idealized passive resistance and cotton, the latter built an empire based on polyester and indoctrinated India’s new middle class into capitalism.

His epic rags-to-riches story began in 1958 in the textile district of Bombay, in an office (equipped with one table, three chairs, and a telephone) from which he quickly came to dominate the Indian market in imported polyester yarn. When he could not obtain adequate financing for his company’s rapid expansion, he issued a stock offering, whose unprecedented grassroots success introduced India to a stock-market culture.

By the time he died, in 2002, at age 69, his diversified company reported annual revenues of $12.2 billion (3.5 percent of India’s G.D.R) and dominated nearly every sector of India’s industrial economy. Yet he died without leaving a will.

A rancorous feud for control of this empire soon broke out between Mukesh and his brother, Anil, who is two years younger. The titanic battle dragged on for three years and, with Reliance accounting for more than 6 percent of the country’s total exports, became very much a matter of state.

In 2005, with the feud dragging down the company’s share price, the ultimate Indian authority—their mother—had to step in to settle things. Dhirubhai’s widow, Kokilaben, laid down the law for her sons: the core petrochemical, oil, and gas interests went to Mukesh, while Anil got power, telecom, entertainment, and financial services. Both retained rights to the Reliance name.

In spite of the deal, however, the vitriol persisted between the brothers (who, until Mukesh’s move to Antilia, both lived in Sea Wind, a 14-floor building in Mumbai, which was divided into separate apartments for their families as well as their mother).

The soap-opera aspects of the Ambani saga, including the brothers’ opposite personalities, were played up by the national media. Anil was painted as the flashy, sporty one, given to driving fast cars and running marathons. In 2008, he made a dramatic entrance into the American film industry, buying a 50 percent stake in Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks. Mukesh, who had studied engineering, was stolid and sedate; it was said his idea of a good time was catching up on technical journals.

Meanwhile, there were reports of a parallel rivalry between their wives. Cut from different cloth, too, the sisters-in-law have never gotten on, it is widely believed.

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In 1991, Anil married Tina Munim, then a glamorous Bollywood starlet (Des Pardes, Adhikar) with something of a past. His parents were said to have opposed the match: it was rumored that they finally gave in after Anil threatened suicide.

Nita, on the other hand, was handpicked by the Ambanis for their elder son. Her graceful figure had caught their eye when they happened to see her performing Bharatanatyam, a form of classical Indian dance, in a show in a Mumbai theater for members of the Gujarati community. (Her parents are both of Gujarati origin.)

“I didn’t know there were two people in the audience who were watching me,” Nita recalls today, referring to her in-laws. “The next day Mukesh’s dad called me. I was a young girl of 20. Imagine, me receiving a call from him!”

In fact, she hung up on him, and did so again when he called a second time, thinking it was a prank caller. Finally, her father persuaded her to take the third call, during which Dhirubhai was brief. “He just said, ‘Come and see me,’ ” she recounts. In the office of the great man the next day, he got to his point: “Would you like to meet my son?”

ONE VISITOR DESCRIBES ANTILIA AS "THE TAJ MAHAL MEETS FLASH GORDON"

THE AMBANIS’ CLOSED-DOOR POLICY HAS ONLY PIQUED THE WORLDWIDE FASCINATION THAT HAS SURROUNDED THE EDIFICE.

When Nita arrived at the Ambani house, accompanied by her parents, she was quickly won over. “Mukesh opened the door himself We started talking. Our mother tongues are the same—we speak Gujarati—so it was quite easy. We were very comfortable with each other. Within four months we were married.”

Reliance was then in the midst of explosive growth, which had prompted Dhirubhai to call his elder son home from Stanford Business School before he could graduate, to help run the company.

Nita’s upbringing, while middle class, was solid—which helped keep her levelheaded when she became part of the wealthy Ambani family. She grew up in what is known in India as a “joint family,” with, in addition to her parents and one younger sister, aunts and uncles and their nine children, eight of whom were girls. “It was a very progressive but traditional family,” she says.

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Following her marriage, Nita worked as a teacher at a private elementary school for three years. For a woman in her new circumstances, a job was unusual, but it was all right with her father-in-law. “I think of him so fondly,” she adds about Dhirubhai. “He always said, ‘If you can dream it, you can do it.’”

She had been shattered when doctors told her she would never be able to have children, but, almost seven years after her wedding, she gave birth to twins in 1991. They were born two months premature at Yale-New Haven Hospital, where she had been taken in medical distress.

Two years ago, when she dropped off Isha, the elder of the twins by one minute, at Yale for her freshman year, Nita showed her the spot in New Haven where she had been born. Now a junior, Isha is a double major in psychology and Asian studies, while her twin brother, Akash, is studying economics at Brown. Another son, Anant, 16, still lives at home.

Nita’s first decade of parenthood was allconsuming, she says: “I was with my children 24-7-365.” But she neglected herself, and gained almost 95 pounds. “I looked like a tent,” she said last spring.

At the same time, Anant was battling obesity, brought on by the doses of steroids he had been prescribed for asthma. Her desire to help him lose weight catalyzed her own effort to do the same. “If I wanted to transform his life, I had to show him I was doing it myself,” she says. The two traveled to a children’s hospital in Los Angeles, where they engaged in the same diet and fitness regimes.

Back at home, she plunged into a rigorous exercise program, the cornerstone of which is one hour of Bharatanatyam every morning. “That is non-negotiable,” she says. “That is the time when the phone and the BlackBerry are shut off. It’s my time to connect to my inner self and to God.”

Nita, who describes herself as “quite spiritual,” wakes at seven A.M. and begins each day with meditation and prayer. All her efforts produced striking results: Nita’s dazzling new shape and look became the talk of Mumbai. In an ironic reversal, her sisterin-law is no longer considered the glamorous one. Anil, meanwhile, has hit a rough patch. Battered by rising interest costs for his debt-stretched companies, and a scandal over the arrests of three of his executives on corruption charges, shares of his companies plummeted in 2011, cutting his fortune by $7.4 billion. But with $7.8 billion left, he is still India’s seventh-richest citizen.

The turmoil led some observers to suspect there were ulterior motives behind a momentous family reunion at year’s end.

On December 27, a convoy of helicopters descended upon the tiny Gujarati village of Chorwad, Dhirubhai’s birthplace. Led by Kokilaben, the entire clan arrived to inaugurate what appeared to be a combination shrine and museum at Dhirubhai’s boyhood home, on what would have been his 80th birthday.

The national media flocked to the scene, literally camping out to cover the two-day event from behind barricades. Sightings of Mukesh and Anil doing the dandiyci—a traditional Gujarati folk dance—made front pages across the land. (Also in attendance were the brothers’ two sisters and their families.)

The perception that Anil had patched things up with his richer brother sent shares of his flagship company up 5 percent. Rumors circulated, meanwhile, that Mukesh had something to gain by a reconciliation— he was looking to lease Anil’s network of telecom towers.

A few analysts thus remained skeptical of this public display of affection, which they found carefully controlled and staged in classic Ambani fashion. According to one report, it was managed and guarded by Reliance Group Support Services, a private army of 5,000 guards and some 600 commandotrained officers.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Nita’s physical transformation occurred after she achieved success in work. In 1997, when Mukesh was building the world’s largest oil refinery, he put Nita in charge of creating an entire town from scratch in order to house the facility’s workforce of 4,800 and their families. Located in a remote desert near the city of Jamnagar, in Gujarat, the new town required a hospital, a school, recreational centers, and shopping facilities, in addition to housing. (Throughout India, the Reliance Group has more than 60,000 employees.)

For about two years, she commuted to the site three times a week, leaving at seven A.M. on one of the company planes for the hour-long flight to Jamnagar, where she worked out of tin sheds in blistering heat, wading through brambles and bushes to various construction sites.

While the township has been recognized worldwide as a model project, what she accomplished in the arid countryside around it is just as extraordinary. She and Mukesh planted 138,000 mango trees on what was once barren land, to create the largest mango orchard in Asia. Planting another 2.4 million mangrove trees for good measure, they basically built their own rain forest, which has altered the area’s micro-climate and eco-system: the trees have brought rain, which in turn has brought migratory birds and animals. “We created real environmental change,” she says. But this success sparked another big change, “a transformation within me,” she says.

Emboldened, she decided Mumbai needed a first-rate preparatory school that was up to international standards. Before the Dhirubhai Ambani International School opened its doors, in 2003, she attended to its every detail, riding school buses to assess their comfort, designing uniforms, choosing fabric for upholstery, sampling the cafeteria fare, as well as planning the curriculum and overseeing faculty appointments. The school is now ranked as one of the best in India.

In 2007 another adventure began after Mukesh came home one night and told her he’d bought a cricket team. Cricket is India’s national passion, if not its religion. Mukesh had purchased the Mumbai Indians, roughly the equivalent of buying the New York Mets.

Nita’s initial reaction was unenthusiastic. “I said, ‘Mukesh, there is so much happening, why do we need a cricket team?’ He said, ‘It will be managed professionally. Don’t worry about it.’ ”

Nita, who had zero knowledge of cricket, sat on the sidelines for the first year. But as the team’s performance sank ever lower, she stepped in and took over the management of the team. She taught herself everything there was to know about the sport.

While her organization had huge stars, they were not working together as a team, she recalls. “It’s not individuals who make teams win; it’s the team.” Nita organized retreats where stars and rookies bonded and built a team identity.

It worked. The Mumbai Indians climbed out of their standing at the bottom of the league and last year won the international Champions League tournament.

Some maternal-sounding motivation also must have helped. “I wanted the boys to feel at ease,” she says. “They were all worried about the final results. I said, ‘Let’s just give it our best and enjoy it.’ ”

Most recently, Nita has launched Reliance Drishti, India’s first Braille newspaper in the national language, Hindi. Drishti (“vision” in Hindi) will be distributed through 375 institutions for the blind across the country.

Beyond these particular projects, including a hospital wing (set to open later this year) and a university (a long-term project), Nita is hugely influential in modern India simply because she is the most trusted confidante and sounding board for its richest citizen. Of late, Nita has been on something of a public-relations campaign, giving interviews with national publications, making herself the public face of the Ambani brand. According to some analysts, Nita has stepped up to the plate to save her media-shy husband from the chore.

NITA AMBANI IS HUGELY INFLUENTIAL IN INDIA AS THE MOST TRUSTED CONFIDANTE AND SOUNDING BOARD FOR ITS RICHEST CITIZEN.

Among friends, however, Mukesh is quite jolly. And, though it does seem hard to square with their new, highly vertical lifestyle, the Ambanis are said by their close friends to be quite down to earth.

“Look at their children—the way they have been brought up. That tells the story,” says film director Vinod Chopra, who is a close friend of the couple’s, along with his wife, Anupama, a journalist.

“A couple of months ago, we all went to London to celebrate one of the kids’ birthdays,” he recounts. “We took the tube to go to the stadium, where we went to see an Arsenal match. Coming back on the tube, Mukesh saw a poster for Tintin and said, ‘Let’s go.’ So we went to a cinema in Marble Arch, and he bought us all popcorn. That’s just the way they are. I never feel like I am any different from them.”

Getting people to talk about the Ambanis on the record is generally a challenge, however. “The whole city is petrified to divulge any information about them,” attests one fashionable lady, who, of course, wishes to remain anonymous.

Privately, some members of India’s wealthy old families express ambivalence about the Ambanis and their new home. “We surely find it brazen, to say the least,” says the daughter of a prominent family. “But this is not your ordinary rags-to-riches story. The Ambanis, and their house, reflect the epic changes in the whole social order of India, with its complex strata. This is a new idea, different from how a cultivated person with wealth used to live. I don’t want to judge them too harshly... It might be me who is out of touch, but, I wonder, who are they speaking to?”

“The Ambanis are admired and at the same time reviled,” says Suketu Mehta, author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found. “Dhirubhai contributed to the national prosperity by enriching ordinary investors, small shareholders. But his success was based on adroit manipulation of the government, especially in obtaining licenses. In Bombay, which is a tremendously entrepreneurial city, people admire the way they have amassed wealth, by hook or by crook. And thus they feel that Antilia befits someone who has risen to the top—if you’re going to be rich, you might as well flaunt it. It’s a mythic building.”

Except for the rare nights when they go out, Nita waits for Mukesh to come home from the office, which is typically at 11. She has the candles lit and supper ready. “I like to have everything smiley and happy for my husband,” she told an Indian publication. “Men don’t want to see a grumpy face at the end of a hard day.” Most nights, the couple then make a conference call to their children at college (it’s daytime on the East Coast) via a Skype system set up by Akash, whom Mukesh describes as “the tech guy” of the family.

Like any Indian housewife, Nita still does the weekly hisaab of kitchen spending. The kids have to clean their own rooms, and when it’s time to go back to school, it’s Air India for them. “We insist on simple things to keep them grounded, like we never send the planes to fetch them,” Nita told a Mumbai glossy. There seem to be plenty of planes to go around. The Ambani air force reportedly includes an Airbus A319 that Mukesh gave Nita as a birthday present. When she does fly, it’s generally for business. Unlike most billionaires, the Ambanis do not have a string of houses around the globe. Antilia is their one and only. “It’s the only home that we have in the world,” she says.

For any visitor to Mumbai, it’s hard not to be aware of Antilia— which is named for a mythical island. A taxi driver took the initiative to point it out to me, with what seemed to be real civic pride. “It’s very famous. Not just in Mumbai but all over the world!” he boasted, and then rattled off a whole series of statistics, some of which were clearly fanciful: “They have their own autorepair shop, a beauty parlor, restaurants! Six hundred workers for six people!”

Contrary to another common misconception, the house does not sit in the middie of a slum, either. Altamount Road is the most expensive street in Mumbai, where real-estate prices are among the world’s highest. Interestingly, this is the street to which Dhirubhai Ambani moved his family in 1968, when he was able to relocate them from their chawl, a type of Mumbai tenement, which has often been described as Dickensian. They moved into an apartment that was comfortable but hardly grand.

Though Antilia is 27 stories high, many of its floors are double or triple height; thus it rises 570 feet, which is the height of a typical 40-story building. As has been amply noted in the press already, the building’s amenities include a multi-story garage, a ballroom, a spa, a theater, guest suites, and lots of terraced gardens. The family quarters sit at the pinnacle. “We made our home right at the top because we wanted the sunlight,” explains Nita. “So, it’s an elevated house on top of a garden.”

Though one visitor describes the house as “the Taj Mahal meets Flash Gordon»” there is, according to Chopra, a real heart behind the dazzle. “The glittering shell hides a very cozy home,” he says. “Eve never felt intimidated there. It’s a home to them, just the way my house is a home to me.”

For anybody who has ever been to Mumbai, which seems to be perpetually enveloped in stultifying heat, humidity, and smog, the wisdom of high-rise life is apparent. It’s about the only way to break out of the heat and haze, and—in the densest of cities, where everyone seems to live cheek by jowl—get some privacy.

High-tech as the house is, there is much about it that is traditional, according to Nita. “It’s a modern home but with an Indian heart,” she says. Working with exquisite materials—rare woods, marble, mother-of-pearl, and crystal—Indian artisans crafted two shapes throughout the building. “The whole house is based on the lotus and the sun,” she says. “The lotus comes from the murkiest water, but it grows into the purest thing.”

Antilia contains a place to worship, which is not at all unusual for an Indian home. “Getting my temple right was so important,” she says. “I am a big believer in Lord Krishna.”

While the couple hosts dinners in the building, by all accounts there is nothing decadent about these gatherings. Strict vegetarians and teetotalers (as are most Gujaratis), the Ambanis typically offer guests the option of wine during cocktail hour, but no alcohol is served at meals, where the vegetarian fare is exquisite.

But that is as much as the Ambanis would like revealed about the house, as I am repeatedly reminded by a trio of Reliance executives who hover around whenever I am near Nita, and with whom nuclear-treaty-level negotiations have been conducted for months for this interview and photo shoot, the location of which the magazine has been asked not to name.

Startling as Antilia is, there is something traditional about it, too, when you put it in context. India’s maharajas have long been famed for their exceedingly enormous dwellings. Only decades ago, the maharaja of Jodhpur built a new home for himself, the Umaid Bhawan Palace, with 347 rooms. (His grandson Maharaja Gaj Singh still lives in a wing of it today, while the rest is a splendid hotel.) But, for a modern maharaja living in Mumbai, a peninsular city where land is in particularly short supply, there is nowhere to go but up—and up the Ambanis went.

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