Would you believe if I told you it was right for your mother to marry your husband? Yes, it seems normal in the Mandi tribe of Bangladesh and India.
A tradition of sharing a husband between mother and daughter! From numerous weird cultures of the world, one such is of Bangladesh and India’s.
Not much found in Urban regions of India, but prevalent in some rural parts of East India. That’s weird I know, but this is what they say!
As a child Orola Dalbot, now 30, liked growing up around her mother’s second husband, Noten. Her mother was remarried when she was 25 and Orola was 3. Noten was handsome and had a broad smi
le.
“I thought my mother was lucky,” Orola says. “I hoped I’d find a husband like him.” When she hit puberty, however, Orola learned the truth she least imagined: She was already Noten’s wife. Her wedding had occurred when she was 3 years old, in a joint ceremony with her
mother.
“I wanted to run away when I found out,” says Orola, sitting in the sunbaked courtyard of her family home in north-central Bangladesh.
“I was shaking with astonishment.” Orola’s mother, Mittamoni, now 51, told her she must accept it and had no othe
r choice.
Among the tribe, widows who wish to remarry must choose a man from the same clan as their dead husband. The only single males, however, are often much younger.
So the custom evolved that a widow, has to offer one of her daughters as a second bride to take over her duties, including s*x when she hits the saturatio
n point.
When Mittamoni became a widow at the age of 25, the tribe offered Noten who was 17, as Mittamoni’s new husband, on the condition that he marry Orola, too. Devastated and broken to discover that she was expected to share her own mother’s husband, she says, “My mother already had two children with him. I wanted a husband of my own.”
