Sunanda was the spouse of well-known politician and former United Nations Under Secretary General Shashi Tharoor. This was her third marriage. Her first husband was Sanjay Raina, a Kashmiri. After that marriage ended in a divorce, she married a Kerala businessman Sujith Menon who then died in a road accident in 1997. She has a 21-year-old son, Shiv Menon, from her second marriage.